Empire of Liberty

RE-MAPPING THE TRANSNATIONAL

A Dartmouth Series in American Studies

series editor
Donald E. Pease
Avalon Foundation Chair of Humanities
Founding Director of the Futures of American Studies Institute
Dartmouth College

The emergence of Transnational American Studies in the wake of the Cold War
marks the most significant reconfiguration of American Studies since its incep-
tion. The shock waves generated by a newly globalized world order demanded
an understanding of America’s embeddedness within global and local processes
rather than scholarly reaffirmations of its splendid isolation. The series Re-
Mapping the Transnational seeks to foster the cross-national dialogues needed
to sustain the vitality of this emergent field. To advance a truly comparativist
understanding of this scholarly endeavor, Dartmouth College Press welcomes
monographs from scholars both inside and outside the United States.

For a complete list of books available in this series, see www.upne.com.

Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom

Bernd Herzogenrath, An American Body|Politic: A Deleuzian Approach

Johannes Voelz, Transcendental Resistance: The New Americanists and

Emerson’s Challenge
anthony bogues

Empire of Liberty

Power, Desire, and Freedom

dartmouth college press

hanover, new hampshire

Published by
University Press of New England
Hanover and London
Dartmouth College Press
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bogues, Anthony.
Empire of liberty : power, desire, and freedom / Anthony Bogues.
p. cm.—(Re-mapping the transnational)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn 978-1-58465-930-3 (cloth : alk. paper)—isbn 978-1-58465-931-0 (pbk. : alk.
paper)
1. Liberty. 2. United States—Foreign relations—Philosophy. 3. United States—
Foreign relations—Moral and ethical aspects. 4. Imperialism—Moral and ethical
aspects. 5. Imperialism—Social aspects. I. Title.
jc585.b578 2010
327.73001—dc22 2010021296

5 4 3 2 1
To my grandmother Imogene
for all that she has taught me and
for my granddaughter Malia
with hopes for a more humane world.
contents

Acknowledgments ix

introduction 1

1 empire of liberty
Desire, Power, and the States of Exception 9

2 race, historical trauma, and democracy

The Politics of a Historical Wrong 38

3 death, power, violence, and new sovereignties 66

4 the end of history or the invention of existence

Critical Thought and Thinking about the Human 98

Notes 123
Bibliography 141
Index 149
acknowledgments

both this book of essays and a platform to think and reflect aloud
would not have been possible without the enormous generosity of
Donald Pease. For a number of years we have been in dialogue
about America. We have not agreed all the time, but Don’s extra-
ordinary insights always stimulate me to think again, even when I
return to my original positions. Additionally, Don’s broad and deep
generosity, securely anchored in a rich conception of the life of the
mind, has been a model in an academy driven by the marketization
and banal professionalization of scholarship. Thank you, Don.
Many ideas in these essays gestated in conversations with colleagues
in the boundary 2 collective, particularly Ronald Judy, Paul Bové,
Joe Buttigieg, and Hortense Spillers. Each of these colleagues has
argued, agreed, or made objections known in different forums. For
this I want to thank them. The other members of the boundary 2
collective have been an important intellectual source of criticism
and support as I have stumbled through my efforts to understand
America. The undergraduate students in my senior seminar class
“Race, Empire, and Modernity,” in the Africana Studies Depart-
ment at Brown University, have quizzed, pushed back, and opened
new lines of inquiry. I thank all the students who have taken this
seminar. Brown University is a special place for undergraduate edu-
cation, and the participation of these students in the seminar added
immensely to the lectures and subsequent essays. When the lectures
were revised, I had a series of conversations with the novelist John
Edgar Wideman, who teaches at Brown. Those conversations found
 Acknowledgments

their way into the final revisions. Every lecturer needs an audience,
and I could not have found a better one than those brave souls who
came to hear all four of these lectures in the spring of 2007. Their
questions and comments pushed me to reformulate many of my
ideas, lecture after lecture, so that the four lectures became a single
conversation with the audience over the course of time. It was a
most stimulating intellectual experience, and my warmest thanks
go to all those who attended these four talks. I also express much
appreciation to Geri Augusto, who commented critically on some
of the ideas in this book. Thanks as well to Dawn Jackson, who,
when the manuscript was finally revised, did the work necessary to
make sure that it arrived at the publisher on time. I want to thank
Richard Pult and Amanda Dupuis of UPNE for the care and profes-
sionalism with which they managed the production of this book.
Appreciation also to David Chu for fine copyediting.
The person who inspired me to think afresh and to ask questions
anew was my grandmother Imogene Tulloch. As a child I had spent
a great deal of time with her in rural Jamaica. Born two generations
after slavery, she taught me with unmatched love, generosity, and
sensitivity that there was nothing more important in the world than
freedom and that, if one understood this, the world would be a
better place. Her influence remains at the core of my life in many
ways. I cannot repay my debt to her for the lessons she taught with
love and care. In the end, I am responsible for the final content of
this book, but I dedicate it to her. This book is also dedicated to my
granddaughter Malia, who was born as I completed the final revi-
sions to these lectures.

Anthony Bogues
Providence
August 2009

[x]
introduction

the lectures collected here were delivered at Dartmouth Col-

lege in the spring of 2007 to inaugurate the Freedman Humanities
Lecture Series. With the exception of the second essay, “Race, His-
torical Trauma, and Democracy: The Politics of a Historical Wrong,”
the essays have been edited only to reflect the different format in
which they are now presented. It has been a delicate balancing act,
keeping to the narrative style of a lecture or conversation while
editing so that a reader may follow the arguments. The second
essay reflects material from a lecture titled “W. E. B. DuBois, Black
Reconstruction, Slave Emancipation, and American Democracy,”
delivered at Dartmouth College for the Futures of American Studies
Institute in June 2008. So in a deep sense all the essays and ideas
presented here were made possible by the creative intellectual space
which Dartmouth College has afforded me over the past few years,
first as a visiting humanities scholar and then as a regular summer
faculty member of the Futures of American Studies Institute.
My theme for the Freedman Humanities Lecture Series was
“Empire of Liberty: Power, Desire, and Freedom.” I chose this theme
because, for the past five years or so, I have been thinking about
what it means to live inside an empire. Living in Jamaica for many
years, I was preoccupied with the nature of imperial power and the
external drives of that power as it impacted the Caribbean and Af-
rica, particularly its military interventions and its none-too-subtle
 empire of liberty

economic coercions through multilateral institutions such as the In-

ternational Monetary Fund (imf) and the World Bank. My political
experiences made me aware of the capacity of an imperial power to
wield undue political influence through either overt or covert means.
Living in the Caribbean, I came of age in the early aftermath of Ja-
maica’s political independence. Thus I was very aware of the opera-
tions of colonial power. In Jamaica, constitutional decolonization
had created a juridically independent nation-state, but hundreds of
years of colonial domination had left stubborn structural legacies.
Of those many legacies one of the most powerful was the effort by
colonial power to reform the so-called native mind. I considered
this feature of colonial power to be the ideological weight of colo-
nial domination. I always felt it was a critical feature because it il-
luminated an aspect of power which, in the heat of radical political
activity, we did not pay sufficient attention to. It was not just a mat-
ter of the ways in which dominant ideas worked by setting limits
or establishing horizons that were then taken for granted. Instead,
those ideas were inhabited and then came to map our social world.
Years ago, Louis Althusser argued that the materiality of ideology
produced subjects in what Stuart Hall, invoking Ernesto Laclau,
described as a “chain of linked interpellations that constitute the
Imaginary.”1 If one of our human labors was or is always upon our-
selves, then it seemed to me that power always has to find ways in
which it can capture that labor. Over time, but particularly when I
moved to the United States, it became clear to me that my initial
preoccupations with questions of ideology were insufficient for grap-
pling with the present constitution of power. This insufficiency be-
came acute as I listened carefully to discussions and debates about
the Iraq war and the responses to the tragedy of 9/11. It was at this
point that I began a study of American political thought as I had
never done before.
In this enterprise I discovered that the most perceptive writer and
scholar on American society was W. E. B. DuBois. Whether it was
The Souls of Black Folk, Black Reconstruction, the hundreds of es-

[2]
 Introduction

says he wrote, or the many books he published, DuBois’s life and

work represented a most remarkable attempt both to understand
America and to change it. It was only then that I came to fully un-
derstand C. L. R. James’s assessment of DuBois, which I had read
some twenty years before. James remarks of DuBois, “There is no
need to subscribe to all that Dr Du Bois has said and done. But long
before the rulers and the leaders of thought in the United States
grasped the essentials of the world in which they lived Dr Du Bois
did, and to look upon him just as a great leader of the Negro people
or just a true son of Africa is to diminish the conceptions and miti-
gate the impact of one of the greatest citizens of the modern world.”2
There was another reason why DuBois appealed to me. Not only
was he a person of both word and deed and was a scholar with
what we call today deep activist commitments, but DuBois moved
seamlessly across many disciplinary fields. In this effort what drove
him was seeking answers to questions that troubled him. But it was
not a self-interested effort, it was one guided by a commitment to
changing the world. It became clear to me as I reread and listened
afresh to DuBois as well as many of the novelists, thinkers, musi-
cians, artists, and writers of what can be called the radical black
intellectual tradition that what had made that tradition distinctive
were the questions it had posed.
In 2002 I began to write a series of essays exploring this tradi-
tion.3 By the time I was asked to deliver the Freedman lectures, I
was in a position to speak and think with and through this tradition
while taking into account other questions posed by thinkers not
operating within the tradition. I owe the reader this brief intellec-
tual history because it situates these lectures and the concerns that
drove them.

In the late 1970s and ’80s the political axis of the West shifted with
the electoral victories of Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and

[3]
 empire of liberty

Helmut Kohl. The emergence of these three figures at the same mo-
ment signaled a decisive shift in electoral political terms and in ideo-
logical framing ones. These political figures set out to change the
terms of contemporary political discourse and for a time success-
fully defined those terms. At the heart of this change was the eleva-
tion of the market into an ethic. As an ethic the market became, in
Antonio Gramsci’s phrase, “common sense.” Ronald Judy reminds
us that common sense is the “designation for that agency which
organizes and enables intentional purposive human activity.”4 How-
ever, for this common sense to consolidate itself, a language had to
be found that could stabilize the primacy of the market ethic for at
least some time. The organizing language for this new ethic was a
conception of “freedom.” Thus, as neoliberalism became the domi-
nant ideology of imperial power, it worked through an ideological
space in which “freedom” became the “common sense.” It was a
remarkable deployment of a term invested with a particular concep-
tion of freedom, which could conjure up the deepest feelings that
organize our lives.
My sojourn in America coincided with the Bush regime’s bio-
political settlement and an attempt to institute a profoundly neo-
conservative project.5 Under the rubric of “the American Century,”
this project called for America to exercise benevolent global hege-
mony. It advocated a mixture of positions requiring America to
control the international commons of cyberspace and the develop-
ment of global missile defense systems that could secure American
power around the world. These lectures were delivered against the
backdrop of the falling apart of this project as the consequences
of the Iraq war created fissures amongst the leading figures in the
project. These fissures could also be seen within significant segments
of the American population, who began to question the legitimacy
of the war.
In these lectures I attempt in broad strokes to understand this
neoconservative project not as an aberration of American civiliza-
tion but as one of its many logics. These logics are rooted in a his-

[4]
 Introduction

torical trajectory of dominant practices in America’s political his-

tory. The lectures therefore are not concerned with the cut and thrust
of the Bush bio-political settlement and its unraveling but rather
seek to understand a different logic which may have been operating.
My goal has been to think about the character of American hege-
mony and to ask: what does it presently illuminate about power? As
I grappled with this question it became clear to me that American
power, while functioning in the conventional ways of all imperial
powers (for instance, through military interventions, economic dom-
ination, and civilizing missions), had a unique quality about it. This
was not strange. All imperial powers have unique features. America
was an empire, but what kind of empire was it? During the Bush
regime many pages were written on the subject. However, it was
Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “empire of liberty,” appropriated from
Edmund Burke, which gave me insight into what I consider to be a
special feature of American imperial power.
Jefferson began to use the phrase “empire of liberty” while argu-
ing for the expansion of the Union. Merrill Peterson has suggested
that for Jefferson, “Liberty was the ultimate value, the Union the
means to be cherished only so long as it furthered the end of its
being.”6 Thus, it seems to me a couple of things are clear. First, at
the moment when “freedom” was being constructed as “common
sense,” it was not a rhetorical cover for imperial adventure, but
rather imperial power was developing a technology of rule that
had been deployed during previous colonial empires. It was a tech-
nology of rule in which the creation of new subjectivities was para-
mount. Second, this configuration of power was occurring in a
global context in which radical ideas and movements had generally
declined. I therefore felt that Jefferson’s “empire of liberty” was not
a metaphor for something else but was a description of a project of
power in which the possibility of total domination was the horizon.
The four lectures presented here center on a set of questions and
issues about “empire of liberty” and its significance as a project of
power: the issues of race and history, the questions of violence, and,

[5]
 empire of liberty

finally, critical thought today. In all of the lectures, there are some
words that serve as keywords, bringing together ideas and argu-
ments into a network of reflections upon the time we presently in-
habit. Of course, the questions of how power can be resisted today
and of what possibilities exist for a different kind of freedom than
imperial freedom haunt these lectures. In thinking about these ques-
tions, I found it useful to return to the theories and practices of
radical anticolonial thinking as one possible basis from which
to develop critical thought. Not that all other currents of radical
thought are exhausted, but important insights may be gleaned from
radical critiques that begin their analysis from the ground on which
the native or racialized body had to construct the human with new
meanings.
The first lecture, titled “Empire of Liberty: Desire, Power, and
the States of Exception,” sets the stage and establishes the grounds
for some of the arguments in the rest of the lectures. Not only does
it discuss the meanings and operations of this “empire of liberty,”
but it argues that, if at one time power worked through ideology as
interpellation to create subjects, today power strives to capture de-
sire and imagination. This lecture is followed by “Race, Historical
Trauma, and Democracy: The Politics of a Historical Wrong,” in
which I think about democracy not as an absence or a formal the-
ory of rights but rather as an intense and intimate experience within
a polity. In this lecture I complicate Aristotle’s notion of the zoon
politikon by arguing that human beings are not made for life in the
polis in some innate way but rather must struggle to construct and
invent ways of life that allow us to practice forms of democracy.
I argue that our concern with ways of life enables us to make de-
mocracy. In this lecture I also suggest that the voyages of Vasco da
Gama and Christopher Columbus inaugurated an epoch of human
history in which both colonialism and racial slavery profoundly
shaped our ways of life for many centuries. Both these voyages shat-
tered St. Augustine’s conception of the fabled antipodes where human
beings lived hanging upside down. While overturning this Western con-

[6]
 Introduction

ception, the voyages opened the way for the institution of a hierar-
chical system of classification of human beings. In this system, dif-
ference and discontinuity in the gaze of the Western observer
became linked to conceptions of historical progress, and race be-
came a determining factor for human status. Therefore we should
not think about questions of democracy without acknowledging
DuBois’s epigraph to the first chapter of Black Reconstruction:
“How Black men coming to America in the 16th and 17th centuries
became a central thread in the history of the United States and at
once a challenge to its democracy.”7 The second lecture does not
argue that race and colonial power created the conditions for de-
mocracy to be an unfinished project, an argument which assumes
that democracy is really constructed around issues of inclusion and
exclusion. Rather it suggests that if democracy requires intimacy
then it has to reckon with the sustained legacies of historical injus-
tice and historical trauma. In the end I argue that democracy is not
really about procedures but, as Jacques Rancière notes, is embodied
“in the very forms of concrete life and sensible experience.”8 The
third essay, titled “Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereign-
ties,” attempts to think about death as a form of politics. Death has
become a haunting specter in the contemporary world. In this essay,
I reflect on genocide and violence in general. I also review the char-
acter of violence in the postcolony. Reflecting on both genocide and
violence, I argue that death and violence are linked to performances
of power as a further illustration that power itself is performative.
As power seeks to become a totality, it desires to command life it-
self. In this form of domination, the bio-political moment is not
one, in Michel Foucault’s phrase, of “make live” or “let die,” nor is
it about the exercise of power as the right of the sword. Instead, it
is about creating conditions of life where death is acceptable. In
such a context, violence does not evacuate power—it is power.
The final lecture asks the perennial question, an ethical, intellec-
tual, and political one. What resources do we have today that may
allow us to think our way out of the various conundrums that we

[7]
 empire of liberty

currently face? Working through the title “The End of History or

the Invention of Existence: Critical Thought and Thinking about the
Human,” this lecture takes up the question of humanism in critical
thought from the perspective of a twentieth-century, radical, anti-
colonial tradition. Arguing that conventional critical theory has
been epistemically blind, I invoke the writings of Frantz Fanon as a
starting point to begin thinking differently about the world today. I
argue that there is a politics of imagination that is central to any
contemporary project of human freedom. So while the essays begin
with Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “empire of liberty” in an explora-
tion of the nature of American imperial power as empire, they end
with a discussion of freedom. It is freedom seen from the perspec-
tive of those who were unfree, from what the Latin American intel-
lectual Enrique Dussell calls the “underside of modernity.” In the
end, the concerns in these lectures center on the human practices of
thinking about and trying to live ways of life that are constructed
around forms of freedom that are about human creativity instead
of domination. If the essays provoke discussion and reflection by
the reader about what these freedom practices might look like, then
their publication has been worthwhile.

[8]
[1]
empire of liberty

Desire, Power, and the States

of Exception

And we Americans are the peculiar, chosen people—the Israel of

Our time; we bear the ark of the liberties of the world . . .
God has predestined. Mankind expects, great things from our race
. . . indeed the political messiah has come. But he has come in us.
—h e r m a n m e lv il l e

The empire and the garden. We are to speak of them the same way. They belong to the
same person. They both belong to God. —ge o r ge l a m m in g

We go on creating what mankind calls an empire while we continue to believe quite

sincerely that it is not an empire because it does not feel to us the way we imagine an
empire ought to feel. —wa lt e r l ip p m a n n

over the past few years there has been a vigorous debate about
the character of America as an imperial power and empire.1 The
parameters of this debate center on questions about the kind of
imperial power that the current configuration of American power
represents. Does American imperial power follow the models of
European colonial empires? Or is American imperial power primar-
ily military, engaging in actions of an unprecedented character in an
age of asymmetrical warfare? Or is American power the only super-
power in a unipolar world? Central to this debate are definitional
issues. For example, does American power meet the definitional re-
quirements of empire?2 Of course, in addition to these questions,
 empire of liberty

there is the perennial one in American political thought: can a re-

public be an imperial power? Are the political logics of a republic
commensurate with empire?3 I wish to begin probing these issues
by recalling three earlier meanings of empire. I begin with a reminder
that the Latin root of empire is imperium, meaning rule and com-
mand. It is an important reminder, since in much of the current defi-
nitional debate about empire, rule and command, and therefore a
certain conception of power, tend to be neglected. Instead, the de-
bate about empire focuses on issues of territorial acquisition, mili-
tary strength, and force. On the other hand, some thinkers, includ-
ing Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, have argued that empire now
means a “logic and structure of rule.”4 For them this structure and
form is about a “new notion of right, or rather, a new inscription of
authority.”5 Although one never clearly grasps the precise nature of
this new right, the authors accurately point us to thinking about the
novel ways in which power operates today. One definition of empire
that has become popular is given by the historian Dominic Lieven.
He notes that empire is:

First and foremost a very great power that has left its mark on the
international relations of the era . . . a polity that rules over wide
territories and many peoples . . . an empire is by definition not a pol-
ity [that] rules with the explicit consent of its peoples.6

This definition has been accepted by commentators and scholars

in various attempts to slot modern American power into a defini-
tional box. This search for a conventional definition, while useful,
may play tricks with one’s thinking. For instance, what happens
when the form of imperial rule does not require territories as we have
come to understand them, when power constructs rule primarily
through self-regulation? Does that make power imperial or not?
My second observation about empire draws upon Pierre Manent’s
comment that the central political problem in European political
history after the dissolution of the Roman Empire was “what were
the political forms at men’s disposal after this event?”7 Observing

[ 10 ]
 Empire of Liberty

that the Holy Roman Empire officially ended in 1806, Manent sug-
gests that the consistent content of the idea of empire was “the bring-
ing together of all the known world, of the orbis terrarum, under a
unique power. . . . It corresponds instead to men’s unity, to the uni-
versality of human nature, which wants to be recognized and ad-
dressed by a unique power.”8 This conception of a “unique power”
and its universal dispositions commensurate with human nature
has been at the core of all major imperial powers.9 As such, some
critical questions we face are: What are the languages and practices
of empire today? And how does empire represent its unique power?
The third meaning of empire I wish to recall is closely allied to
the first, but it is a more precise definition of “unique power.” The
Roman philosopher and statesman Cicero noted that, while Roman
roads and architecture were integral to the success of the Roman
Empire, pax Romana was constructed on ways of living that were
based on “our wise grasp of a single truth.”10 This “single truth”
was embodied in the phrase civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citi-
zen). The imperial political formulation of civis Romanus sum was,
in Cicero’s phrase, “a single joint community of gods and men.”11
Here we come to an aspect of empire not often examined. Cicero’s
phrase should give us pause. It suggests that imperial power is also
about establishing ways of life that rest on a single truth determined
by power as common to human nature. Cicero’s conception of em-
pire has been central to different forms of imperial power that typi-
cally operate under the language of “civilizing missions.” In this
regard American imperial power, with its practices of representative
democracy and free markets, which are then deployed as “freedom,”
is no different. However, there are differences between various forms
of imperial power. American power, while based on military power
and violence, draws extensively from two other things. The first is a
notion of representative democracy and liberal freedom as the single
truth that must be grasped by all humanity. Second, at the level of
language, American imperial power takes seriously the deployment
of a form of power by which self-regulated, individual subjectivity

[ 11 ]
 empire of liberty

meshes with the drives of the imperium.12 At this point I am not

referring simply to ideological hegemony. Rather, I am pointing to
ways in which American imperial power in its present configuration
seeks to capture desire and imagination, to consolidate its single
truth as the only way of life, thereby confirming to itself and us that
we are indeed at the end of history. Winston Churchill, whose po-
litical career coincided with the demise of the British colonial em-
pire, remarked at a lecture at Harvard University in 1943, a few
years before the political independence of India, that “the empires
of the future are the empires of the mind.”13 It was a telling com-
ment because, reflecting on the demise of Britain’s colonial empire,
Churchill saw clearly that the political sustainability of empire as a
form of rule was only possible with the self-regulation of subjectiv-
ity through processes of interpellation.
To tell a story of America as an imperial power, of its desire for
a unique kind of domination, requires us not only to tell a different
narrative of American power but to think about the question: What
are we as humans? It also requires us to ask the question: how shall
we live together? Michel Foucault notes that when Kant asked the
question, “What is the Enlightenment?” he really was asking: What
is happening at a specific historical moment? In the twentieth cen-
tury, perhaps four issues have shaped our long-term political under-
standings: colonial power, various forms of racial domination, fas-
cism, and liberalism in its various guises. Three of the four have been
historical hinges, that is, they have been events in which we have
had to ask ourselves: what kind of life is possible after colonial
domination, racial domination, and fascism? What I am suggesting
is that our contemporary moment is one such historical hinge, at
which the question about what is happening to us is a global one.
This is the importance of grappling with the “empire of liberty” as
a modality of power today. I now wish to place a caveat on the
table before we proceed. I do not intend to present an entire theory,
nor do I wish to engage in formal theory-building in these lectures.

[ 12 ]
 Empire of Liberty

Rather I hope to point to a set of directions that may facilitate an

understanding of the present. So with that let us move on to the
“empire of liberty.”

Empire of Liberty

How might one think about empire today? I have already indicated
that my focus will be on ways of life, about how power constructs
subjectivities. As a precursor to this, I turn to a set of historical
discourses and material practices that shaped the emergence of the
American “empire of liberty.”
In American intellectual and political history, liberty quickly came
to mean self-government. In 1776 Richard Price noted that liberty
rested upon “the idea of self-direction or self-government.”14 In this
regard Lockean ideas of natural liberty and the civic republicanism
of this period operated on similar grounds, even though they emerged
out of two distinct intellectual traditions. To have an imperium
based on notions of self-government at first seemed improbable.
However, the answer to this apparent difficulty resides in our capac-
ity to think about the precise practices of liberty as self-government
and to find the language that will allow for that understanding.
For this purpose, Thomas Jefferson’s phrase “empire of liberty”
is apt. Writing about the nature of America’s westward ambition,
Jefferson redeployed Edmund Burke’s phrase and attributed to
American power the historic role of creating an empire of liberty.
At the level of political language, this designation signaled certain
forms of power. While conventional imperial rule usually meant vio-
lence that originated in founding violence, for Jefferson an empire
of liberty was possible because a state could “conquer without war.”
In a letter to Thomas Pinckney, Jefferson noted that war was “not
the best engine for us to resort to.”15 Thus, at the level of political
language and affect, an empire of liberty conjured up a different
project of imperial power than the conventional colonial one. Julian

[ 13 ]
 empire of liberty

Boyd describes Jefferson’s conception of an empire of liberty in some

detail:

Though he called [it] an Empire of Liberty . . . it was to be neither an

isolated political entity nor an imperialistic force for compulsory ex-
tension of ideals of liberty. Its domain and compulsions would be in
the realm of the mind and spirit of man . . . incapable of being re-
strained, and holding imperial sway not by arms or political power
but by the sheer majesty of ideas and ideals.16

Thus for Jefferson force was still necessary for rule within the
empire of liberty, but the sustainability of its political power resided
in the realm of the mind and in bending consciousness to conform
to what was seen as the natural spirit of being human. An empire of
liberty as imperial power therefore recognized the natural unfold-
ing of human destiny as embodied in ways of life that were founded
on conceptions of American liberty. At the level of political dis-
course, coercive force is perceived to be absent from this unfolding,
and, when perchance force is deployed, it is with regret. However,
this is a paradox, because conquest is a consequence of war. Jef-
ferson’s empire of liberty implied that American power needed to
wage a different kind of war, not military battles but wars in which
humankind would come to recognize that America was “the sole
depository of the sacred fire of freedom and self-government, from
hence it is to be lighted up in other regions of the earth.”17 This was
a war to construct ways of life. In this regard the American empire
of liberty distinguishes itself from imperial Rome, where citizenship
was seen as the essential ingredient of pax Romana. Instead, pax
Americana requires acceptance of the single truth expressed most
aptly during the period of neoconservatism by Roger Kaplan:

the purpose of power is not power itself; it is a fundamentally liberal

purpose of sustaining the key characteristics of an orderly world.
Those characteristics include basic political stability, the idea of lib-
erty . . . respect for property, economic freedom and representative
government.18

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 Empire of Liberty

Critical to such a project is the representation of America. We

are aware today that the modern can be staged as representation. I
would argue that, depending on the force of the representation and
its embeddings in a set of historical events, representation has a
capacity to incorporate a self-narrative, which creates a material
life that enters into the social architecture of the lived experience of
the world, thereby creating a distinctive imagination of the real.
Central to this is language. When the discourse of a specific repre-
sentation becomes all-powerful, we do not become bewitched by the
language games of grammar, but rather a word, a discourse, takes
on a life in which we invest desire. Raymond Williams has suggested
that some words are “strong words.” Such words have conceptual
values; they invoke and define. I suggest that liberty is one such
word and that when it becomes the single organizing truth it pro-
vides the ground for one series of political practices.
Historically, America’s westward push was conducted at the ex-
pense of the Native American population. In the nineteenth century,
this push involved a war with Mexico and the military defeat of
many Native American groups. The symbolic code that organized
this push was embodied in the phrase “manifest destiny,” the idea
that America’s expansion was part of its providential design. This
design was at the core of the formation of the American Republic.
At the inauguration of the republic, even the most radical of think-
ers believed in this design. Thomas Paine, for example, invested the
new republic with the power to create an entire new world when he
remarked in 1776, “We have it in our power to begin the world
all over again.”19 Others like Joel Barlow compared the birth of
the republic to that of a savior of global proportions. This idea of
America as the force for regeneration of the world was expressed at
the beginning of the twentieth century by Albert Beveridge who
remarked that “God had made us the master organizers of the
world. He has marked the American people as his chosen nation to
finally lead in the regeneration of the world. This is the divine mis-
sion of America.”20 There has been since its inauguration the idea

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 empire of liberty

of American power as the ultimate power on the planet. One of my

arguments is that the discourse that has surrounded this power has
been constructed around the idea of liberty.
One may summarize the emergence and consolidation of Amer-
ica as an imperial power in three phases. In the first, there is the
process of internal territorial conquest of Native American land
and the social and political defeat of this population. In the second,
there is an external push through which a few territories are ac-
quired. In this second phase, there are also numerous interventions
in Latin America and the Caribbean, primarily focused on bolstering
American economic strength.21 In these two phases the system of
racial slavery and racial domination are of course central elements.
In the third and current phase, while economics is important (as it
is quite frankly central in all phases), the key objectives are attempts
of American power to create ways of life.
The historian William Appleman Williams has already argued
for this conception of American empire.22 However, his deployment
of the phrase ways of life speaks mostly to historical continuities
within American history. I want to use this phrase with a different
tone and meaning. Ways of life are forms of human living, they are
thoughts and practices that define and create our human world as
well as modes of belonging to a society. Hannah Arendt once ob-
served that the singular fact that creates politics is that “. . . men,
not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world.”23 From this
stance, Michel Foucault poses a critical question: how are human
beings made subjects? This question, I wish to suggest, is the cen-
tral political question of our time. Thus the contemporary political
problem is not about how we are ruled, about sovereignty in the
conventional sense of thinking about political obligation. Instead I
pose other questions: What kind of human beings are we? And how
therefore shall we live? This is a difficult point to grasp for two
reasons. The first is that, for many places around the world, “necro-
politics” is the order of the day, making death and violence every-
day political norms. Very often in our response to this, we turn our

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 Empire of Liberty

eyes away from the spectacle of violence and seek refuge in forms
of liberalism. When we do this, we transpose our preoccupation
with order into a preoccupation with security, and fear drives our
short-term political sentiments. Second, at the sites where liberal-
ism has split the public and the private, the dominant argument is
that there are no major political problems that cannot be solved by
contemporary mechanisms of rule. In both these instances, the po-
litical is nested within questions of how we are ruled, and as a con-
sequence we study the various technologies of power centering on
forms of what is called democracy. My argument is simply that this
question of rule is no longer structured around questions of politi-
cal obligation but rather around creating subjectivities.
The question of rule, who should rule and how it should be done,
as well as issues of legitimacy, were the historic, central questions
for the nation-state. In the contemporary period, these questions are
not unimportant, because, as Foucault reminds us, a new technol-
ogy of power does not exclude the former one but “modif[ies] it to
some extent . . . makes use of very different instruments.”24 How-
ever, if one feature of our modernity in its colonial incarnation was
how to conquer and control bodies (slaves and natives), then today
the political field is global, and, in addition to conquest by force,
there is an emphasis on the creation of political and social subjec-
tivities. This does not negate the drive for violence, but it does point
to an important dialectic between coercion and hegemony and to
power’s rearrangement of its modalities of domination.
Today liberal power (a dominant form of power) has shifted its
focus and seeks to move beyond its historic bio-political moment.
To put this another way, if Foucault is right that biopolitics deals
with the population “as a problem that is at once scientific and
political . . . as a biological problem and as power’s problem” and
that the nub of governmentality is now directed to “man-as-species,”
then, I would argue, the drive for power, while still directed at “man-
as-species,” wishes to regularize power through the construction of
ways of life and modes of self-regulation.25 To my mind this makes

[ 17 ]
 empire of liberty

the moment a bios-political one, that is, one in which both subjec-
tivities and the imagination carry tremendous weight in the opera-
tions of power. Thus I would argue that one critical element of the
repertoire of power today is a drive to capture desire. There are two
genealogical tracks that I will now follow to illustrate this point. The
first one tracks power in the conventional way, in the emergence of
liberal power through sovereignty. The second track follows the
emergence of power through coloniality. These are analytically dis-
tinct, but I want to draw out a set of relationships between them.

The Tracking of Power

As discussed earlier, when sovereignty emerges in Western thought,

it concerns itself with the questions of political obligation and rule.
Issues having to do with nationality and territory are attached to
the emergence of sovereignty. One account of the emergence of sov-
ereignty claims that rights operate in a double way. First, there are
natural rights, and second, some of these rights are given up so that
governance can occur. There is disagreement, as we know, in the
case of Hobbes. For Hobbes, sovereign power is about security, for
Locke and others, it is about creating the context for the mainte-
nance of natural rights. This is more or less the conventional story in
political theory about the emergence of sovereign power and natu-
ral rights theory. However, Foucault leaves that story behind. In a
remarkable essay titled “Subject and Power,” he provides a geneal-
ogy of power in which he pays attention to what he calls the “tricky
combination in the same political structures of individualization
techniques and of totalization procedures.”26 Foucault identifies
the origins of this form of power in Christian institutions and calls
it “pastoral power.” He tells us that pastoral power is a form of
power “whose ultimate aim is to assure individual salvation in the
next world.”27
For Foucault, and in accordance with the argument that I am
making, the most important feature of pastoral power was its con-

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 Empire of Liberty

figuration as a form of power which could not be exercised “with-

out knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their
souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It im-
plies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.”28
This ecclesiastical mode of power spread beyond its original loca-
tion and in time became a major feature of power. In this shift,
knowledge of conscience was replaced by a drive to capture desire
and reshape it. Two historic events made this possible.
The first event was the abolition of racial slavery in the Atlan-
tic world and the subsequent debates in both colonial British and
American circles about what the ex-slave should become. (I will
return to these debates later.) The second event occurred with the
economic and accompanying discursive transformations in America
in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Regarding the
latter, William Leach makes the point that, by the 1880s, attempts
were made to transform the dominant discourse about American
society from “land of comfort” to “land of desire.”29 He further
argues that by 1912 American culture had become preoccupied with
“consumption as a means to reach happiness, the cult of the new,
the democratization of desire.”30 This is an important plank of my
argument. A review of the debates about how to produce consumer
consciousness in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries reveals
a great deal. With the emergence of mass production, the dominant
social classes needed to tap into the imagination of other sections of
the American populace. In an article on advertising published in
1901, Fogg Mead noted that the successful creation of a mass con-
sumer required creating within an individual the “ability to want
and choose” and therefore “opening up imagination and emotion
to desire.”31 Leach points us to Katherine Fisher, another advertis-
ing expert, who in 1899 wrote “Without imagination, no wants”
(emphasis mine).32 As American capitalism transformed itself in
the twentieth century, the United States became a society in which
the world of consumption was synonymous with the meaning of
freedom. A form of rule that required the self-regulation of subjects

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 empire of liberty

accompanied this shift. It was at this point that the technologies of

rule developed inside coloniality began to find resonance in the ways
power now had to operate. So let us for a brief moment track this
second incarnation of power, colonial power.
Sovereign colonial power, as Achille Mbembe makes clear, oper-
ates on command and violence. It converts its “foundational vio-
lence into an authorizing authority.”33 The defining feature of colo-
nial sovereignty was “might is right,” the right of the sword. But
colonial sovereignty had other facets of rule. In constructing rule, it
also had to make fundamental attempts to shape the consciousness
of the so-called native. All the European colonial powers had this
drive. However, I wish to use French colonial power as an example,
because there are unusual parallels with some issues seen today,
particularly those concerning the relationship between a republic
and an empire. As Raymond Williams tells us in Keywords, when
the word civilization was used in the eighteenth century, it was in
opposition to barbarity.34 In France, the colonial civilizing mission
called mission civilisatrice rested upon, as Alice Conklin tells us,
“the fundamental assumptions about the superiority of French Cul-
ture and the perfectibility of humankind.”35 By the late nineteenth
century, French politicians were arguing that “We must believe that
if Providence deigned to confer upon us a mission by making us
masters of earth, this mission consists not of attempting an impos-
sible fusion of the races but of simply spreading or awakening among
other races, the superior notions of which we are the guardians.”36
The question that divided French politics at the time was not over
the ethics of colonialism but over how to implement the best form
of colonial power with its civilizing mission.
In other words, could there be conquest without war?37 For lib-
eral power, I would argue, whenever this dilemma about the possi-
bility of conquest without war occurred, it was typically resolved in
such a manner that war and the civilizing mission went hand in hand.
Historically, therefore, this supposed dilemma has never stopped the
forward march of colonial power and conquest. However, as stated

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 Empire of Liberty

earlier, there were other aspects to colonial power. Frantz Fanon

made it clear that colonial power “reformed” the “native’s mind.”
Writing in 1952’s Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon notes that “To
speak means to be in a position to use a certain syntax, to grasp the
morphology of this or that language, but it means above all to as-
sume a culture, to support the weight of a civilization.”38 To create
the new subjectivities of the colonized, colonial power insisted on
colonial language and used that language to transform desire and
therefore imagination. What is the nub of my argument here? It is
this: the technologies of colonial power were not only central to
twentieth-century fascism, as Arendt, Césaire, and others have re-
minded us, but they continue to shape power’s deployment. While
ruling colonies with force, colonial power also had to manage sub-
jectivities. I suggest that today this management of subjectivities has
become a basic political requirement of liberal power.
If, during the period of colonial modernity, the political economy
of exploitation was the central feature of the colonial project, along-
side missions of civilization, then by the nineteenth century, liberal-
ism moved to locate the civilizing mission and thereby subject for-
mation and ways of life to the center of the colonial project. One of
the most important events signaling this shift was the abolition of
racial slavery in the Caribbean.39 It is significant that many theorists
concerned with a genealogy of liberal power, including Foucault, do
not mention or examine this event. Yet one cannot read some of the
writings of John Stuart Mill, one of the most important nineteenth-
century liberal theorists, without thinking about the specters of
slavery and the colonial project.40 American imperial power, in its
current phase and with all its complexities, allows us to examine
how liberal power deepens this element of the construction of ways
of life as central to the current repertoire of imperial power. The
conditions for the performances of American imperial power in the
contemporary geopolitical space are new today. One feature of this
space since the end of the Cold War is the idea that, for the first time
since the beginning of the twentieth century, a single truth can now

[ 21 ]
 empire of liberty

be imposed upon all human populations. Listen to sections of Presi-

dent Bush’s national security speech from 2003. The president pro-
claims that “the advance of freedom is the calling of our time; it is
the calling of our country. . . . we believe that liberty is the design of
nature; we believe that liberty is the direction of history.”41 Is it not
clear that the drive of American imperial power is to trap human
life within this framework of a single truth, of liberty, in order to
achieve America’s destiny? Some time ago, Sacvan Bercovitch noted
how biblical history had been incorporated into American thought
and experiences. Bercovitch observed that this incorporation “con-
secrated the American present as a movement from promise to ful-
fillment, and translated fulfillment from its meaning within the closed
system of sacred history into a metaphor for limitless secular im-
provement.”42 Over time, American liberty has become the meta-
phor not only for human improvement but for the definitive way in
which humankind is to construct ways of living.
In political terms, this American liberty, this unique, single truth,
can be expressed within liberalism. Here I wish to move away from
the common American party-political use of the term. Liberalism in
different guises is America’s governing political code and political
language. As a political theory of modernity, liberalism posits tenets
about the moral primacy of the individual within the foundations
of a market economy. As John Gray notes, liberalism in its dis-
courses on toleration requires that “liberal institutions are seen as
applications of universal principles.”43 The revival of earlier con-
ceptions of liberalism in the present period, sometimes in opposi-
tion to elements of liberalism that developed in the twentieth cen-
tury, has not transformed liberal political theory into something
else. Neoliberalism intersects with liberalism. There is a way in
which the “tricky ground of liberalism as a final way of life creates
the conditions for a conception of imperial power which calls itself
‘imperial liberalism.’” Robert Cooper, a key advocate of this view,
notes that:

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 Empire of Liberty

We have chosen to do good rather than to be powerful. Torture is

unacceptable not just because it is ineffective, but because our system
is based on respect for individual people. Europeans talk of human
rights and the rule of law while Americans talk of freedom and de-
mocracy, but they mean the same thing. For America, the way to be
good in a world of power used to be to isolate itself. That is no lon-
ger possible. Instead it seeks to remake the world in its image. This is
the European project also. . . . There are many ways we can assist
short of employing force—using military power to provide security
is one of them—but in the end it is the force of the idea and the
power of its practice that conquers. Liberal imperialism may be an
oxymoron, but imperial liberalism may be the reality of today44 (em-
phasis mine).

This “imperial liberalism” can be understood as an “empire of

liberty.” So far I have characterized American imperial power as an
empire of liberty, an empire in which conceptions of American lib-
erty are the single truth. I wish to do two things now. First, I want
to make a set of arguments about this empire of liberty as a phe-
nomenon that goes beyond our common understanding of ideology.
Second, I want to describe more precisely what the characteristics
of this American liberty are.

Ideology and American Power

Louis Althusser tells us that there is a materiality to ideology, not

only in its rituals but also in the effect of its practices. Although
Althusser develops a rigid schema when discussing the relationship
between the subject and ideology, he is correct to point out that “the
category of the subject is only constitutive of all ideology insofar as
all ideology has the function (which defines it) of ‘constituting’ con-
crete individuals as subjects.”45 For Althusser, ideology interpel-
lates individuals as subjects. Stuart Hall and others have critiqued
this notion of ideology and its place in reproductive articulations of

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 empire of liberty

society as too integrative and functionalist. I agree with this criti-

cism but think that Althusser’s point about St. Paul should be kept
in mind. Althusser writes, “As St. Paul admirably put it, it is in
the ‘Logos,’ meaning ideology, that we ‘live, move and have our
being.’”46 How we “live, move and have our being” constitutes our
ways of life. Following this approach, we could say that American
liberty is a dominant ideology that has us in thralldom, and that
what is needed in radical politics is a counterideology. And in one
sense this is accurate. But we face a difficulty going down that
path. What is the language of the counterideology when liberty is in
many ways already captured? Can we deploy liberty or freedom as
a general counterclaim? And if we do, then what might it mean?
The real conundrum here is that liberty has become central to the
signification system of liberalism and as a word performs political
action. It is a speech-act that, in its language performances, is not a
distortion, nor does it operate as a metaphoric trope. It has become
a master key in the language of liberal political discourse. Thus we
have to ask, what work does this word do? How does it shape sub-
jectivity? Human subjectivity is of course one part of a large net-
work of discursive formations and practices, but, before proceeding
any further, I turn to one of the most important essays written by
Raymond Williams, “The Analysis of Culture.” Grappling with the
problem of how to characterize culture neither as pattern nor as
character but as part of an actual experience through which humans
live and have experience, Williams argues that culture is really a
“structure of feeling.”47 Since 1961, when Williams promulgated
this idea, there has been much debate. However, in this lecture I
want to think about how a word such as liberty can generate a
“structure of feeling,” not as an act of culture, but as a word that
represents so much about ourselves and how we may wish to live,
or at least presents the possibilities of how we might live, that the
word itself takes on a life in which it becomes a feeling rooted in
desire. It is in this sense that I wish to posit liberty, or freedom, as

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 Empire of Liberty

one node in the formation of subjectivity. Liberty as a word be-

comes a container, which we may fill with different things.
From the point of view of American power, President Bush re-
cently described American liberty in the 2002 document National
Security Strategy of the United States. The opening sentences of this
document sum up the idea of a single truth, proclaiming “The great
struggles of the twentieth century between liberty and totalitarian-
ism ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a
single sustainable model for national success: Freedom, democracy,
and free enterprise.”48
In the general geopolitical moment we inhabit, American power
feels specifically that the global political field is open for the con-
struction of its empire of liberty. In order to achieve this outcome,
it is critical to implement power so as to capture desire and imagi-
nation. It is this exercise of a modality of power that seeks to go
beyond ideology as we know it that I wish to draw your attention
to. This is not simply a question of “soft power,” as Joseph Nye and
others have argued. This is about creating power of a certain type.
If Lacan is correct that there is a diachronic aspect to everyday de-
sire and that this desire can be articulated through demand,49 then
the next logical step in power’s ability to create subjects would be
to capture desire and in turn to create a certain kind of subject who
is a particular human being. In this regard, I think Sylvia Wynter is
correct in pointing us to the ways in which bourgeois society has
created homo oeconomicus.50
This activity of power, which attempts to capture desire and imag-
ination, has two dimensions that I want to point out. In the first,
capitalism and market economics have created a way of life that
Zygmunt Bauman has called “consuming life.”51 This way of life
can be summed up in an advertising slogan I saw in a London de-
partment store in 2004. The sign read: I shop therefore I am.
In the second dimension, power in performing hegemony seeks
to close all the possible gaps through which the imagination of

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 empire of liberty

alternatives is desired. In this drive, power attempts to shut out all

possibly different futures, which is why I suggest that it seeks to go
beyond hegemony. I argue this because we should recall that hege-
mony is flexible; it is always contested, always trying to appropriate
new elements in order to construct its dominance. In contrast, con-
temporary forms of imperial power seek to construct closure.
There are of course many other arguments about American
power, and some say it is more accurate to describe American impe-
rial power as imperialism. This argument turns on J. A. Hobson’s
Imperialism. Writing at the beginning of the twentieth century,
Hobson noted that imperialism meant the conquest of territory
and in particular the “method of wholesale partition which as-
signed to us great tracts of African land.” For Hobson, imperialism
was marked by “new colonial policy in France and Germany,” and
the heart of this policy in the case of the British Empire was that
no colony established during the late nineteenth century was to be
“endowed with responsible self-government.”52 Following this line
of argument, some have argued that the American case is one of
“imperialism without colonies”53 or have suggested that America
represents a new imperialism. Clearly, the historic trajectory of
American power has constructed a language of power in which a
form of self-government appears as the form of sovereignty.54 As
such, the American imperium is deeply connected to and expresses
itself in the political language of liberty and rights. Since the mis-
sion of empire is to unfold American liberty, the construction of
domination is an important element of American power’s reper-
toire. One important dimension of this process concerns the rela-
tionship of American liberalism to power and the intimate con-
nections between political language and its symbolic capacity to do
the work of domination. We need to discern as well that imperial
power is not simply about either the external deployment of power
or foreign policy but is deeply connected to the internal dynamics
of power. Imperial power is not only “over there,” it is also “over
here.”

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 Empire of Liberty

Liberalism and American Empire

Louis Hartz’s The Liberal Tradition in America stands as one fram-

ing mid-twentieth-century political theory text that attempts to tell
the success story of American liberalism. Hartz, inspired by Alexis
de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, seeks to demonstrate the
twentieth-century significance of Tocqueville’s nineteenth-century
statement about America’s uniqueness, by which human beings are
born equal “instead of becoming so.” For Hartz the consequence of
this natural equality was the creation of the liberal mind. In part,
Hartz’s project found in the uniqueness of America an explanation
of why left-wing or socialist movements and ideas could not suc-
ceed in America. The historic effect of Hartz’s text was to add an-
other component to the success story of American liberalism. Rog-
ers Smith, in his remarkable book Civic Ideals, makes the point that
in working on American political thought he concluded that neither
the Lockean liberalism of Hartz nor the civic republicanism of J. P.
Pocock and others adequately explains inequality, race, or American
civic identity. Focusing on the meanings of American citizenship,
Smith advances a position of “multiple traditions. . . . American
political actors have always promoted [these.] [C]ivic ideologies . . .
blend liberal, democratic republican and inegalitarian ascriptive el-
ements in various combinations.”55
Although Smith tries to unearth another tradition which speaks
to issues of inequality in America and that demolishes Tocqueville’s
myth of innate equality, Smith’s text does not engage the ways in
which liberalism as a set of historic practices might itself be impli-
cated in inequities. Instead, and in a manner typical of conventional,
normative, political theory, Smith perceives inequities as alien
practices outside of liberalism’s frame of reference. These inequities
are then explained as gaps between norms and ideals. The political
theorist Judith Shklar notes that the emergence over time of a
“liberalism of rights” was integral to American liberalism. Observ-
ing that the history of American political thought focuses on the

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 empire of liberty

idea of rights, she demonstrates that “rights are not this open door
that allows us to reach our goals . . . but they allow us to realize our
goals against others.”56 In other words, liberal practices were si-
multaneously founded upon a privileging of the individual and the
creation of a series of exclusions. It means that liberalism has a
double structure. When this double structure operates within the
crucible of a religious or teleological fate of human destiny, liberal-
ism takes on the mantle of a single truth. One cannot therefore
think of American liberalism in purely secular terms. It has to be
concretely located within all the discursive frameworks of Ameri-
can thought.
The genealogy of American liberalism is not separate from the
founding narratives of the American colonies. For not only did the
white settlers flee England either to find a land of religious tolera-
tion or to make names for themselves, but they did so as groups
that embodied the “rights of Englishmen.” These rights were an-
chored in the rights of conquest and the capacity of the settlers to
put aside the rights of the indigenous American population. Rich-
ard Hakluyt, in his 1585 text Pamphlet for the Virginia Enterprise,
describes the situation well when he writes, “We may, if we will
proceed with extremity, conquer, fortify, and plant in soils most
sweet, most pleasant, most strong, and most fertile, and in the end
bring them all in subjection and to civility.”57
In American thought, readings of liberalism are sometimes con-
nected to the fantasy of virgin lands. This is a fantasy that is deeply
embedded in the idea of res nullius. William Crashaw, when justi-
fying the Virginia settlement in 1610, preached the doctrine of res
nullius and urged the settlers forward in a mission to give the “Sav-
ages what they needed most, civility for their bodies and Christianity
for their souls.”58 The imaginary of virgin lands was one symbolic
requirement for the story of American liberalism as the natural
unfolding of human destiny. While Donald Pease has made a com-
pelling argument that the rupturing events of September 11, 2001,
created a historical turning point in America’s entire symbolic ap-

[ 28 ]
 Empire of Liberty

paratus and inaugurated the “Homeland Security State,”59 the dou-

ble structure of American liberalism allows us to grasp Pease’s apt
formulation of the “Homeland Security State” not as an aberration
but as one possible, politically logical consequence of the historic
practices of liberalism that were operative through an empire of
liberty.
In this regard, Sheldon Wolin observed that “the superimposition
of empire upon democracy . . . suggests that the traditional catego-
ries of citizen, democracy, state, and power desperately need refor-
mulation,” and he attempts to do this by positing the idea of the
“imperial citizen.”60 It seems to me that the founding moment of
America created this citizen, that these qualities were reinscribed by
the legalities and materialities of racial slavery, internal territorial
expansion, and external interventions, while constructing a version
of liberty that would be rooted in the empire of liberty. Today, it is
this form of liberty that has become the spectacular embodiment of
American imperial power.

The Empire of Liberty and States of Exception

Recent theorization of this moment and of imperial power has been

influenced by the writings of Giorgio Agamben and his formula-
tion of “the state of exception.”61 I wish to turn briefly to the ways
that political theorists have used Agamben’s work. In doing this I
critically review the concept of “state of exception” and its applica-
bility to our understanding of American power. American liberal-
ism emerged and developed within and alongside a system of racial
slavery, and it is to that system that we now turn in order to review
its shaping of American power and the operation of that power. In
doing this review, I touch on topics that will be fully developed in
the other lectures, but I make a few gestures here to some of these
issues, in part to deepen the coherence of the lecture series.62
Racial slavery constructed modes of being. As a system of domi-
nation and historic injustice, racial slavery and its legacies should

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 empire of liberty

force us to think about Theodor Adorno’s musings on the possi-

bilities of thinking after Auschwitz. How are we to think after a
historical catastrophe? Racial slavery in the United States was based
upon what the Caribbean historian Elsa Goveia has called “a spe-
cial kind of property—that is property in persons.”63 U.S. Supreme
Court Chief Justice Roger Taney’s opinion in the Dred Scott case,
which stated that blacks were forms of property, confirms Goveia’s
analysis. In an astute essay, Colin Dayan notes that “the legal slave
[was an] artificial person who [existed] as both human and prop-
erty.” She further argues that “in juxtaposing these two conditions
of being . . . the potent image of the servile body can be perpetually
invented.”64 The slave codes were illustrative of Goveia and Day-
an’s view. For example, the slave codes of South Carolina drafted
by John Locke stated, “Every Freeman of Carolina shall have ab-
solute power and authority over Negro slaves, of what opinion or
religion soever[sic].”65 Racial slavery meant, in the words of a 1680
Virginia statute, that “if any Negro lift up his hand against any
Christian he shall receive thirty lashes, and if he absent himself or
lie out from his master’s service and resist lawful apprehension he
may be killed.”66 So racial slavery created a situation of civil death,
not just social death as Orlando Patterson argues. It created a legal,
ontological, site of the outside, a zone in which the treatment of
bodies with violence rested upon laws, customs, and statutes. But
this was a problematic outside status, because, although the slave
was property, he or she could and did speak. The Cuban poet Nico-
lás Guillén captures this paradox in his extraordinary poem “I
Came on a Slaveship,” where we read the following:

I see Menendez stretched out.

Immobile, tense
The open lung bubbles.
The chest burns.
His eyes see, are seeing.
The corpse lives.67

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 Empire of Liberty

This is the paradox: a body that experiences both civil and social
deaths, a double death—speaks! It is within this speech that we
begin to see the first contours of alternative languages of liberty,
now called by the enslaved freedom, thereby establishing a series of
distinctions that are still in need of explication today.68
If, as Michel Foucault notes, the key act of “Sovereign power’s
effect on life is exercised only when the sovereign can kill. . . . it is
essentially the right of the sword,”69 then it is important to under-
stand how, in racial slavery, the sword of the slaveowner could be
wielded. Part of the answer lies in the ways bodies were excluded,
and in how these exclusions created the boundaries of the system.
The legal exclusion of the slave’s black body, the fact that the slave
was property-in-person, meant that there was an originary, onto-
logical lack of black bodies in the body politic. This created sites of
exceptions within the polity that were simultaneously intimate with
liberal power. It is this intimacy that I think opens another set of
doors for analysis.
Within the liberal paradigm, power is supposed to be exercised
over “free” individuals, that is, bodies who have a clear field of pos-
sible conduct. However, within the sites of exceptions (systems of
racial slavery and colonialism), there are no free individuals. Power
therefore works through violence both as a first and a last resort.
But the matter is more complicated than this. Giorgio Agamben, in
an analysis of the logic of sovereign power, notes that the exception
is outside and what is “outside is included not simply by means of
an interdiction or an internment. . . . the exception does not sub-
tract itself from rule; rather the rule, suspending itself, gives rise
to the exception and . . . [maintains] itself in relation to the ex-
ception.”70 In the systems of racial slavery and colonialism, the
exceptions are the rule. There is no suspension of any rule to create
a new condition of exception. In other words, the close relationship
between slavery and the juridical customs and statutes that gov-
erned society did not create a figure who can be called homo sacer.
So in contra-distinction to even critical narratives about liberalism,

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 empire of liberty

we find that the regimes of racial and colonial domination mean

that liberal practice has a double structure by which it operates.
Consequently, there is no gap between norms and ideals, and, con-
trary to Agamben’s position that “the state of exception appears as
a threshold of indeterminacy between democracy and absolutism,”
sites of exceptions as I have described them are themselves constitu-
tive of both historical and contemporary rule.71 Then there is the
matter of how race turns the black body itself into a constituted site
of exception. Therefore, even when the black body was legally free
(a non-slave), this body could be recaptured and enslaved during
slavery. To get a better sense of this, we turn to another aspect of
current debate, the discussion about torture and its relation to the
notion of cruel and unusual punishment. Again here, we are open-
ing up spaces that we will discuss fully in another lecture.
Abu Ghraib not only opened the door to further criticism of the
war in Iraq but punctured the narrative that liberal power does not
engage in torture. In addition, the torture of prisoners, detainee
abuse at the Guantánamo Bay naval base, and the deployment of
certain interrogation procedures force us to reflect upon the practices
of liberal power and its double structure. Colin Dayan has pointed
out that the history of the notion of “cruel and unusual” has “been
coupled in lasting intimacy in our legal language and courts, yet
they have been vexed by a persistent rhetorical ambiguity that has
been used alternately to protect and to legitimize violence.”72 This
ambiguity is embedded in the history of American juridical thought,
which had to come to grips with racial slavery and its consequences.
For instance, in the 1844 appellate case Turnipseed v. State, the chief
justice of the Alabama Supreme Court, when overturning the con-
viction of a slaveowner for beating a slave, noted, “Cruel as indict-
ing the infliction of pain of either mind or body, is a word of most
extensive application; yet every cruel punishment is not perhaps un-
usual; nor perhaps can it be assumed that every common infliction
is cruel.”73 But what separates the two? And under what circum-
stances do “cruel” and “unusual” comingle?

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 Empire of Liberty

For “cruel” and “unusual” to comingle and operate in tandem,

a certain kind of body is required. The slave body was both black
and “outside,” yet inside the body politic. A similar outside status
holds for the prisoners at Abu Ghraib and the “ghost detainees” at
Guantánamo Bay. American imperial power has decided that these
prisoners and detainees do not fall under the Geneva conventions
pertaining to war. Their bodies are not the norm, as any review of
the policy debate within the Bush administration reveals. A draft
memorandum from the U.S. Justice Department on the application
of treaties and laws to detainees argues that the “Taliban militia
was more akin to a non-governmental organization that used mili-
tary force to pursue its religious and political ideology.”74 The doc-
ument further argues that the Geneva conventions do not apply to
what it calls “failed states,” since these states are not recognized by
international law.75 The criteria for a failed state are what matter
to us here. These include:

• The collapse or near-collapse of state authority

• The prevalence of violence that destabilizes civil society and the
economy
• The inability to have normal relationships with other
governments76

Clearly, these practices represent not just an exception to the norm,

not just the suspension of rights, but the use of earlier historical
practices in which the following procedures are carried out:

• Construct hierarchical conceptions of the human

• Locate the undeserving outside the body politic
• Render the undeserving civilly dead bodies
• Inflict punishment upon these “dead” bodies

When this is accomplished, torture and cruel punishment are no

longer viewed as cruelty, but as techniques of intelligence-gathering.
Judith Shklar has written that “cruelty is a wrong done to an-
other creature.” Once liberal power excludes and acts against the

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 empire of liberty

human being cruelly, such actions become the painful material as-
sertion of the sovereign and of power.
A second form of exclusion appears in the language of those U.S.
Supreme Court cases called the Insular Cases. The cases, tried be-
tween 1901 and 1922, laid the discursive framework for the territo-
rial acquisition by the United States of Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S.
Virgin Islands, and American Samoa. In these cases, the language
of Justice Edward White extended a series of legal arguments that
had emerged during the previous century. Justice White argued that
“Puerto Rico was not a foreign country, since it was owned by the
United States, it was foreign in a domestic sense.”77 In the 1831
case of Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia, the justices rendered
the Cherokees members of “domestic dependent nations.”78 All
these exquisite legal formulations of exclusion form, I would argue,
an integral part of liberal political practices and thought and are
therefore very much part of the liberal archive. And one must re-
member that these exclusions were also racially organized, making
Charles Mills’s felicitous phrase the racial contract quite apropos.79
I now turn to the final aspect of the double structure of America’s
liberalism, the way in which that double structure creates the condi-
tions which transform liberty into a form of domination.

Empire of Liberty, Freedom and Domination

In attempting to describe American liberty, Tocqueville noted that

such a liberty “defies analysis . . . it is something that one must feel,
and logic has no part in it.”80 In this framework, American liberty
was a set of lived experiences whose meanings could only be culled
from the experiences themselves. While we are able to glean mean-
ings from our experiences and actions, we can also discern logics.
As a speech-act, American liberty functions as a synecdoche for the
possibilities and meanings of freedom.
Speech-acts are fundamental to the political. In political practice
they can be performative utterances that may function as action it-

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 Empire of Liberty

self. In political practice speech-acts not only designate positions

but through language create positions, in many instances consoli-
dating themselves both as practice and discourse. However, key so-
cial and political ideas are not somehow free-floating and therefore
available to be snatched out of the air and made to land wherever
one wants. Thus, if we begin to think about how key political terms
function in metonymic ways, then we will see that American liberty
is not a false ideology but rather one whereby one element of lib-
erty (primarily individual, political liberty) now stands in for liberty
itself. Second, and this is important, we need to understand how
this form of liberty over time becomes the matrices for political
subjectivities.
In the American historical process, as American liberty stood in
for liberty in general and became integral to political language, it
came to define the entire political field itself. Liberty as speech-act
and utterances became constructive of and integral to the creation
of legitimacy. I am thinking particularly of how American liberty
becomes the idea of America. In this way American liberty as pax
Americana sets out to achieve what Cicero desired—a “joint com-
munity of gods and men,” under a single truth.
American liberty has the capacity to act as symbolic power. Pierre
Bourdieu makes the cogent argument that “to understand the na-
ture of symbolic power, it is . . . crucial to see that it presupposes a
kind of active complicity on the part of those subjected to it.”81
Bourdieu eloquently underscores this observation by noting that
“dominated individuals are not passive bodies to which symbolic
power is applied, as it were, like a scalpel to a corpse.”82 Since sym-
bolic power acts with consent, the question regarding American
liberty is not how consent is manufactured but what are the desires
that power seeks to touch and then create. When thinking about the
transition from disciplinary power to the new technology of power
in the late-eighteenth-century West, Foucault observes that power
is directed to “man-as-species,” and that “it is therefore not a mat-
ter of taking the individual at the level of individuality but, on the

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 empire of liberty

contrary, of using overall mechanisms and acting in such a way as

to achieve over all states of equilibration or regularity.”83 Regular-
ity is the key word here. What American liberty wants to achieve is
to become the regular and thus normalized political field on which
human polity occurs. The political and discursive form by which to
do this is the empire of liberty. Such an attempt means that liberty
becomes a code for domination, not a metaphor for freedom.
This is perhaps one of the most difficult things for us to grasp:
a word that generates feelings of creative human possibilities, that
suggests the absence of oppression, now stands as a sign of domina-
tion. To work our way through this riddle, we should understand
that thought is always embodied. We should also consider that
thought has both frames and boundaries and that language and
metaphor institute these. Making the case that human life-forms
are autoinstituted, Sylvia Wynter argues that human cognition does
not represent “an external reality, but rather specif[ies] one.” In the
realm of the political, this specification was rooted in the problem
posed by modern Western theorists of natural liberty. The question
was not, what form of government should we have, but how should
we be ruled? The shift from absolute sovereign power to represen-
tative sovereign power consolidated liberty as the main form of the
political. Liberty became linked to naked existence. It was required
for security, and, as Graham Burchell observes, by “the end of the
eighteenth century, the terms liberty and security have become al-
most synonymous.”84 Thus, over time liberty as political language
and speech-act became embodied in a set of historical practices, not
only as a dominant ideology of the powerful, but as what Antonio
Gramsci calls the “common sense” of our times, the organizing prin-
ciple of our ways of life. It is a name that specifies our way of life
and has done so for a long time. And today it is the ground from
which power seeks to act. As an empire of liberty, power exhibits a
drive to flatten all spaces with the smooth language of liberty. It is
no wonder that those who are currently enslaved by liberty have
mourned its appearance. Perhaps if we begin to think about freedom

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 Empire of Liberty

not as synonymous with liberty but as having a different historical

trajectory, as different from Roman liberty and natural liberty, as
having emerged from the underside of colonial modernity, we may
be able to give a different answer to the new political question, what
kind of human beings are we?
My argument here is a simple one. There is a dialectic of freedom
that emerges not from the liberal tradition and its double structure
but out of the interstices of domination. This practice of freedom
disrupts normalized imperial liberty. It is a form of freedom in which
there is a poiesis of life with no foreclosures. Such a practice of free-
dom requires invention and is predicated upon the radical imagina-
tion. I will return to the discussion of this form of freedom in the last
lecture. For now I wish to leave the last moments of this lecture to
the poetry of the African American poet Langston Hughes. He writes:

There are words like Freedom

Sweet and wonderful to say
On my heartstrings freedom sings
All day everyday
There are words like Liberty
That almost make me cry
If you had known what I know
You would know why.85

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[2]
race, historical trauma, and democracy

The Politics of a Historical Wrong

How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the history of the United States, at once
a challenge to its democracy and always an important part of its economic history and
social development. —w. e . b . d u b o is

My job becomes how to rip that veil drawn over “proceedings too terrible to relate.” That
exercise is also critical for any person who is black, or who belongs to any marginalized
category, for, historically, we were seldom invited to participate in the discourse even
when we were its topic. — t o n i m o r r is o n

this lecture follows the one titled “Empire of Liberty: Desire,

Power, and the States of Exception” in two ways. First, I continue
to explore some of the ways in which contemporary power func-
tions, but this time I pay more attention to issues of race and democ-
racy. In discussing these issues, this lecture works through questions
of historical trauma while examining politics and democracy. A sec-
ond feature of this lecture is the fact that its shape has been gener-
ated by our conversations following the first lecture. For this second
lecture, I had originally intended to focus on reviewing the relation-
ship between democracy and race, on thinking about how the rela-
tionship between the structures of racism and race itself influences
discussions and debates about democracy. I would have mostly paid
attention to the idea that racial power complicates any idea of de-
 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

mocracy, arguing that not much attention has been paid to the issue
of complication except in understandings of democracy as a mini-
malist representation of political equality. As I reflected more upon
this issue and upon the question-and-answer period after the last
lecture, I became convinced that, with regard to questions of race
and democracy today, it would be productive to think about his-
torical trauma, to reflect with you on the ways in which trauma, not
as a psychoanalytic term or state, but as a social wound inflicted
upon the body and the self, operates within a social context. As I
make this move, I pose the following question: what does the pro-
cess of historical trauma or of an event of historically catastrophic
proportions mean when its legacies linger and shape the present?
One of the issues this lecture addresses is: how do the processes of
historical trauma, not as a single event, but as a historical event
of long duration, through repetition become catastrophic, produc-
ing conditions and practices in the political realm? From this per-
spective, I ask: how do these conditions and practices shape democ-
racy? As is my style in approaching these complex issues, I deliver
a caveat here. I will not offer a psychoanalytic reading of race and
democracy, although I will deploy terms of psychoanalytic prove-
nance. Rather, I will explore trauma and its relationship to racial
domination and democracy by working through the original, Greek
meaning of the word, trauma as wound, injury inflicted upon a
body.
With these preliminary remarks, let us begin. Racial slavery, Jim
Crow, and general racial domination pressed down on black human
flesh. The performance of power in these circumstances was a form
of domination that one may call power in the flesh. It was power
directing bodies through injury of the flesh. Saidiya Hartman, in a
remarkable text on terror and slavery, reminds us that the “terrible
spectacle” inducting Frederick Douglass into slavery was the beat-
ing of his Aunt Hester.1 She argues compellingly that the violence
inflicted upon the slave body made the slave identify violence as an
“original generative act equivalent to the statement ‘I was born.’”2

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 empire of liberty

If violence is the generative act that creates slave life for the black
body, this is a violence upon and in the flesh. Such performances of
violence create wounds on the body over a historical period and
generate conditions for what we may call a historically catastrophic
event. Such an event is not a singular one that we mark off with
periodization boundaries, including a prelude and an aftermath.
Rather, a historically catastrophic event is one in which wounds are
repeated over and over again. In the case of coercive racial domi-
nation and racial slavery in the Atlantic world, these wounds were
repeatable and repeated through the master’s whip, rape, shackles,
lynching, or the relegation of the slave to the status of a non–human
being in everyday life, located, in Frantz Fanon’s words, in a “zone
of nonbeing.”3 Thus one of my questions is: how can, or rather,
how should we think about democracy under such conditions? In
this lecture, I am not as interested in how history is written after
traumatic events, in grappling with what Dominick LaCapra calls
the “elusiveness of the traumatic experience.”4 Instead, I wish to
think about the politics of the wound, the politics of a historical
catastrophe, and the ways in which, if we reflect upon the relation-
ship between the wound as historically catastrophic and as a wrong,5
a different space may open up in which we may talk and think about
practices of democracy. From this perspective, democracy is not a
consensual, rational practice that operates through forms of delib-
erative procedures and leaves legacies intact, but is one way to re-
formulate struggles for forms of radical equality. I wish to open up
this political space in part because, if racial domination (either in its
coercive form or in twenty-first-century constructions of hegemony)
is a site of exception within a racial state, the ending of this form of
domination resides in a “constitutive outside.” Here I do not mean
that the struggles against racial power are simply a dialectical nega-
tion of racism. Rather, like all things that are located “outside,”
radical antiracist practices that have as their logic a radical equality
are not commensurate with efforts that focus on racism primarily as
the lack of inclusiveness within a democratic polity.

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

Trauma and History

Let us begin by talking about trauma. Although I am not going to

develop a psychoanalytical reading of race and democracy, it is use-
ful to observe some things about trauma at the outset. A lively field
of “trauma studies” has opened up in the humanities, due primarily
to what can be described as a psychoanalytical turn. One of the lead-
ing figures in the field, Cathy Caruth, paraphrases Sigmund Freud
when she suggests that in trauma there is a:

Breach in the mind’s experience of time, self and the world—it is not
like the wound on the body, a simple healable event, but rather is an
event in which the structure of its experience . . . is not assimilated
or experienced fully at the time, but rather is only done so, belatedly
in its repeated possession.6

Another important figure, Ruth Leys, remarks on “the absolute

indispensability of the concept [of trauma] for understanding the
psychic harms associated with certain central experiences of the
twentieth century, crucially the Holocaust but also including other
appalling outrages of the kind experienced by the kidnapped chil-
dren of Uganda.”7 She also notes that today trauma is a “debased
currency.”8 Some scholars, when examining the African American
experience, have pointed to cultural trauma as one possible way of
understanding issues of history and identity. For these scholars,
cultural trauma is understood as a “memory accepted and publicly
given credence by relevant membership group.”9 In this definition,
racial slavery becomes a traumatic event related to memory. I make
two observations about this line of argument. First, it takes the
view that the experience of trauma is related to flashbacks. Second,
it positions collective memory as the source of these flashbacks and
recollections. However, most scholars do not address the issue of
repeatable wounds that occur because of an initial event. Thus, to
see the African American experience primarily in terms of cultural
trauma as defined by these scholars does not allow us to grapple

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 empire of liberty

with historical trauma as wound. From my perspective, however,

memory is a fundamental, contested site of politics and in the case
of racial slavery it is of extraordinary importance.
Toni Morrison makes the point that American writing placed a
deliberate veil over the event of racial slavery. She notes, “Over and
over, the writers pull the narrative short with a phrase such as, ‘But
let us drop a veil over these proceedings too terrible to relate.’”10
Morrison’s novel Beloved rips open this veil as memory work be-
comes storytelling. In Beloved, memory work is the recounting of
the initial traumatic event and its terrible consequences. The event
is too horrible to remember but must be remembered. The politics of
such memory work is a complicated matter, but it pushes power to
acknowledge a historical wrong. Although Cathy Caruth and oth-
ers have argued that it is not the experience of the event that causes
trauma but the remembering of it, a remembering that occurs after
a period of forgetting, the event of racial slavery is of a different
character. When describing traumatic neuroses, Freud observes:
“Now dreams occurring in traumatic neuroses have the character-
istic of repeatedly bringing the patient back into the situation of his
accident, a situation from which he wakes up in another fright.”11
As an event, racial slavery was a historical wrong structured around
racial domination. Over time two kinds of racial power emerged,
one coercive and the other hegemonic. Both in turn generated ways
of life that negated the humanness of African Americans.
Racial slavery and its violences constructed what Stephanie
Smallwood calls the transformation of “African Captives into At-
lantic commodities” and constituted the generative event for the
construction of racial domination in the New World.12 At the level
of historical flow, there were two traumatic experiences. The first
was the transformation of the African body into an African captive,
and the second was an awareness on the part of this captive person
of a death that would be experienced differently. Smallwood puts it
well when she describes the crossing of the Middle Passage this way:
“Entrapped, Africans confronted a dual crisis: the trauma of death,

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

and the inability to respond appropriately to death. . . . more fun-

damentally, on the sea voyage, even the African dead were enslaved
and commodified, trapped in a time–space regime in which they
were unable fully to die.”13 The point I am making here is worth
repeating. With racial slavery and racial domination there is the rep-
etition of traumatic events. Racial slavery was therefore a layered
traumatic event that created the ground and opened up the space
for another series of traumatic events that made history a catastro-
phe, thereby creating a social wound. In such circumstances, trauma
as a social wound is experienced, assimilated, and understood im-
mediately by those historically traumatized. There is no temporal
gap in the experience. At the same time, this traumatic wound pro-
duced an array of politics that constituted critical elements of a
black intellectual and political tradition.14 These elements were in
part responses to the historically catastrophic event. However, they
did not only work through the event but oftentimes expanded the
boundaries of conventional political and social thought.
In drawing a distinction between historical and structural trauma,
LaCapra notes that “structural trauma is related to transhistorical
absence . . . and appears in different ways in all societies.”15 He ar-
gues that this form of trauma is different from historical trauma,
which functions in the direction of loss and is “specific, . . . not
everyone is subject to it or entitled to it or the subject position as-
sociated with it.”16 While we should pay attention to this distinc-
tion, the social wound of racial slavery straddles both forms of
trauma. Racial slavery generated a historic loss, what Smallwood
calls a “disappearance [that] threatened to put saltwater slavery
beyond both the physical and metaphysical reach of kin. . . . Would
the exiles be able to return home . . . ?”17 This loss can be grappled
with through discourses, politics, and narratives to such an extent
that the themes of exodus, redemption, and return litter all the dis-
cursive formations of black diasporic politics. This originary loss and
exile expressed itself in twentieth-century Ethiopianism as well as
in various forms of black internationalism, of which the movement

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 empire of liberty

of Marcus Garvey, the Universal Negro Improvement Association

(unia) was the exemplar in the early part of the last century. The
consistent appeal of radical black diasporic movements that em-
bodied conceptions of return arose both from the generative trau-
matic event and from its repeated repercussions. I put the matter
in stark terms: for the African diaspora in the Americas, even if one
were not born a slave, the fact of slavery marked one’s life. Thus an
individual black life becomes lived history, with the historical
trauma of racial slavery congealing into wounds and scars of his-
tory. One might call these wounds and scars a form of structural
trauma.
The wounds and scars of history, when inflicted, are of course
witnessed. However, those who witness the wounds do so as outsid-
ers, since the black being is often invisible, or in the words of W. E. B.
DuBois, remains “a problem.” Often, the witnessing is superficially
a blank stare of nonengagement. This is a profound paradox, be-
cause, as Robert Gooding-Williams observes in his discussion of
DuBois’s formulation of American racial domination as the appear-
ance of the “Negro Problem,” “Black bodies, in fact, have been
saturated with significance.”18 Thus the stare is not one of nonen-
gagement but rather one that already positions the black body as
unworthy. The black body was or is, in Fanon’s words, marked by
“legends, stories, history, and above all historicity.”19 This historic-
ity operates through the repetition of past events and their consis-
tent transformation into wounds. As stated before, racial slavery
was the originary trauma; antiblack racism becomes the frame for
the repetition of the wound and constructs parallel lives for African
Americans. And here I mean two things. First, all major social and
economic indices demonstrate that African American lives are ad-
versely impacted in terms of education, income levels, access to
health care, and, perhaps most damning of all, incarceration rates
for young black men. Glenn Loury makes the point that the prison
system in America is the principal venue “in which the legacy of . . .
history remains vividly apparent. . . . We are . . . becoming a nation

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

of jailers—and, racist jailers at that.”20 In his Tanner Lectures,

Loury accurately argues that substantive racial justice has not been
achieved, and he posits that what has occurred is instead a form of
“procedural race neutrality.” He then remarks that American pris-
ons house 25 percent of the world’s inmates and that a large per-
centage of these individuals are black and brown, in numbers dis-
proportionate to their presence in the population. He observes that
a black male resident of the state of California “is more likely to go
to state prison than to state college.” And Howard Winant makes
an important point, which we should ponder. Writing about the
new politics of race, he observes that we are in the middle of a tran-
sition from “racial domination to racial hegemony.”21 Putting aside
my initial concerns about hegemony as a form of domination, I
think that Winant is pointing us to the fact that certain forms of
coercive domination do not seem as prevalent in what some have
called the post–civil rights era as they once were. He also points to
the fact that race and racism are constantly being made and remade
and are therefore adapted to the demands of the moment.
In addition to social and economic indices (higher rates of un-
employment among blacks than whites), there is another dimension
to how race is lived in America. I want to turn my attention to a
demonstration of how antiblack racism as a structured form of
domination reaches out and transforms human relations, becoming
the framework within which the social is lived in America. One
dominant, common myth in the American narrative is that America
is open to all immigrants. I do not wish here to be drawn into
current debates about immigration in the United States; my own
perspective on the matter mirrors the sentiment on a placard at a
demonstration supporting immigrant rights. The placard reads: “No
person is a non-citizen.” What I wish to draw your attention to is
how antiblack racism as a sociohistorical construct operates, struc-
turing and transforming identities.
In 2001 the New York Times published a book titled How Race Is
Lived in America. Built upon numerous interviews and first-person

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 empire of liberty

narratives, the text, though not completely successful, offers some

glimpses of the everyday meanings of antiblack racism. I wish to
draw our attention to one story, because it speaks to the pervasive,
dominant constitution of the historicity of the black body as lack.
The story concerns two friends who immigrate to the U.S. from
Cuba. In Cuba they were the closest of friends, but in America,
Ruiz, one of the two friends, says, “It’s like I am here and he is over
there . . . and we can’t cross over to the other’s world.” The narra-
tive continues:

Ruiz discovered a world that neither the American television nor

Communist propaganda had prepared him for. Dogs did not growl
at him and police officers did not hose him. But he felt the stares of
security guards when he entered a store in a white neighborhood and
the subtle recoiling of white women when he walked by.22

These stares and this recoil are indicative of how the black body,
in particular the male black body, is perceived. In 1950, Fanon de-
scribed a corporeal schema in which the sight of a black body in-
cites fright. He wrote, “‘Look, a Negro! . . . Mama, see the Negro!
I’m frightened! Frightened! Frightened!’”23 A half century later,
fright turns into stares and recoil, as the black body remains the site
of a historical wrong that American democracy has no answer for
and is still unable to grapple with. There are many reasons for this,
and we will explore some of them in this lecture. One of them has
to do with the material privileges of whiteness, which make wit-
nessing a detached experience. As far back as 1903, DuBois put the
matter very well when he wrote in The Souls of Black Folk, “be-
tween me and the other world there is ever an unasked question
unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through
the difficulty of rightly framing it. All never-the-less, flutter around
it.”24 Never fully able to confront the profound meanings of anti-
black racism as one consequence of racial slavery, American democ-
racy therefore does not think about the meaning of race for de-
mocracy. In part, the problem lies in the narrow liberal conception

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

of democracy as political equality. From this perspective, the way to

address racism and its consequences is to work within the frame-
work of a binary of inclusion or exclusion. This way of thinking
about race in America evacuates forms of structural legacies, mak-
ing any analysis of racism reducible to a lack of formal procedural
equality that can be solved with different procedures of representa-
tion. But the different levels of representation that mark forms of
inclusion have not resolved in any way, shape, or form the fact that
we are a nation of “racist jailers,” making the punishment of prison
a form of disciplinary politics for the black body. What is clearly
required is another view of democracy, for us to think, if possible,
from the perspectives of those who have been slaves, whose ideas
and practices have been erased from the body politic. In beginning
to do this, I want to engage in a comparative reading of two texts:
Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America and W. E. B. Du-
Bois’s Black Reconstruction. I do this as one possible means of be-
ginning to rethink race and democracy in America.

A View of American Democracy

Alexis de Tocqueville’s two-volume Democracy in America is still

seen as the seminal work on American democracy. In the words of
Donald Pease, Democracy in America, published in 1835, “sup-
plied the concepts, generalizations, and categories out of which
U.S. citizens were encouraged to experience and make sense of U.S.
democracy.”25 Pease compellingly argues that “political scientists,
literary theorists, philosophers, and citizens alike have invested
Tocqueville’s work with a metahistorical knowingness about U.S.
democratic culture.”26 It is therefore appropriate that, in examining
American democracy, one begins with Tocqueville’s work. In the
1848 edition of the book, Tocqueville wrote that the “advent of
democracy as governing power in the world’s affairs, universal and
irresistible, was at hand.” This idea was of course in accord with
his original introduction to the book, in which he stated that “the

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 empire of liberty

gradual development of the principle of equality is a providential

fact.”27 For Tocqueville, democracy in America was about the “gen-
eral equality of conditions among people.”28 As he made clear in
the second volume of Democracy in America, equality was a more
important political value than political liberty. He notes that “po-
litical liberty is easily lost. . . . men therefore hold on to equality not
only because it is precious to them; they are also attached to it be-
cause they think it will last forever.”29 Tocqueville’s preoccupation
with democracy was grounded in his sense that a social revolution
had broken what he called the “spell of royalty,” and this revolu-
tion had at its core the principle of equality attached to conditions.
This was an equality in which the former hierarchies were threat-
ened. In other words, for Tocqueville the critical question was how
a democratic revolution in the nineteenth century could create new
conditions, different from those that previously existed. Thus his
concern was about more than formal equality; it was about equality
as an embedded condition of life. Tocqueville was not as focused on
issues of political liberty or political equality as he was on a general
condition of equality. We should, however, be clear. It is not that
political equality did not matter, because, as Sheldon Wolin has
noted, “one of the great themes in Democracy is the appearance of
the people as full-fledged political actors continuously involved in
the exercise of power.”30 However, the “new science of politics” that
Tocqueville called for would describe the conditions of equality, con-
ditions under which the so-called “tyranny of the majority” would
be more of a cultural force than a legislative force. Tocqueville won-
dered, as Wolin so ably points out, about “‘the invisible and intan-
gible power of thought’ affecting millions of beings scattered over
vast distances,” under these conditions of equality.31
I would argue that Tocqueville, when considering these issues and
their relationship to democracy, decided that what was necessary
was that: “the light of intelligence spreads, and the capacities of all
classes tends towards equality. Society becomes democratic, and the
empire of democracy is slowly and peacefully introduced into insti-

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

tutions and customs” (emphasis mine).32 Here one should of course

note the use of the word empire. Wolin has suggested that in this
instance it means sway. I want to argue that here the word empire
means the single universal truth under which human beings should
live. We know that Tocqueville supported the French colonial em-
pire and that he developed a positive view of French colonialism in
his writings on Algeria.33 In part, his positions on colonialism rested
on the popular, conventional concept in European thought that
there existed a hierarchy of nations and peoples and that at the
apex of this hierarchy were Christian nations, who had a right to
civilize so-called “savage nations.” Thus I would argue that it was
not unusual for Tocqueville to understand democracy as a “provi-
dential fact.” But what about racial slavery? How did Tocqueville
view racial slavery, and how did he see the relationship between
slavery and American democracy?
In his 1843 essay “The Emancipation of the Slaves,” Tocqueville
acknowledged that, regarding the abolition of slavery, “it is difficult
to think of greater or more important questions today.”34 He be-
lieved that the abolition of slavery was an important issue, because
for France the “keeping [of] the colonies is necessary for the strength
and greatness of France.”35 For Tocqueville, while abolition was
necessary, it had to be achieved under conditions that would not
adversely impact French colonialism. Although he did not mention
Haiti and the Haitian Revolution in this essay, the memory of the
revolution haunted his thinking, particularly when he wrote, “eman-
cipation is . . . A very dangerous enterprise. . . . we must resolve to
do it, but at the same time we must study with greatest care the
most certain and the most economical means of succeeding.”36 It is
therefore safe to say that Tocqueville’s attitude toward slavery in
the French colonies favored gradual abolition, as long as abolition
did not trouble the French colonial enterprise. He saw the system
of slavery in the colonies as the foundation of their great wealth.
Slavery was integral to the social and economic structure of the colo-
nies and to the sustainability of colonial power. Therefore abolition

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 empire of liberty

required a delicate and gradual process. However, when it came to

America, Tocqueville had a different view. He did not see racial
slavery as integral to the economy of America. His views on slavery
were rooted in what he considered to be the natural superiority of
white civilization and in the impossibility of blacks and whites’ liv-
ing together.37 The so-called natural superiority of whites, specifi-
cally Anglo-Americans, meant for Tocqueville that, even though
black slaves were badly treated as slaves, they were not and could
not be part of American democracy. Indeed, from Tocqueville’s per-
spective, racial slavery had no impact upon democracy and the
principle of equality. Thus, when Tocqueville turns his attention to
questions of race in America at the end of the first volume of De-
mocracy in America, he makes it clear that he never had time in the
preceding narrative of over three hundred pages to write about
slavery, because in his mind slavery was a topic that was “American
without being democratic [and] to portray democracy has been my
principal aim.”38 For Tocqueville, although slavery was not demo-
cratic, it had no relationship to, did not inform, and did not shape
American democracy. This is an important point, since such a nar-
rative really argued that racial slavery was somehow separate from
American democracy, as opposed to seeing American democracy as
based on racial slavery and therefore shaped by its history. This
narrative of separation presents slavery as an aberration, not as a
historical wrong deeply shaping our present.
It is interesting how Tocqueville finally pays attention to slavery.
After hundreds of pages discussing equality as a custom, after many
chapters describing some of the political institutions of America (its
systems of townships, constitutional arrangements, judicial power,
political parties, liberty of the press, various forms of political as-
sociation, and issues of representative rule by the majority), Tocque-
ville examines slavery and the genocide of the Native American
population not by thinking about these modes of power in their
social forms but by taking a distinctly racial view, one in which race
is a scientific fact of nature, with some races superior and others

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

inferior. By thinking in this way, Tocqueville could write, without

sensing any contradiction, that:

An absolute and immense democracy is not all that we find in Amer-

ica; the inhabitants of the New World may be considered from more
than one point of view. In the course of this work my subject has
often led me to speak of Indians and Negroes, but I have never had
time to stop in order to show what place these two races occupy in
the midst of the democratic people. I have shown in what spirit and
according to what laws the Anglo-American union was formed39
(emphasis mine).

We should note here that Tocqueville is very clear—American

democracy is racially exclusive, the Anglo-American union is a ra-
cial state of white supremacy. It is a racial state that, though demo-
cratic, has no need to pay attention to racial slavery and Native
American genocide because:

Among these widely differing families of men, the first that attracts
attention, the superior in intelligence, in power, and in enjoyment, is
the white, or European, the MAN pre-eminently so called; below
him appear the Negro and the Indian. . . . both of them occupy an
equally inferior position in the country they inhabit; both suffer from
tyranny; and if their wrongs are not the same, they originate from
the same author.40

Tocqueville then speaks about the oppression of the “Negro,”

which deprives “the descendents of the Africans of almost all privi-
leges of humanity.”41 Having noted this, he then makes an argument
popular at the time, that racial slavery had “debased” the black
slave. It was a strange argument. First you make a human being a
slave, then you say that his enslavement means that he has become
debased and therefore cannot be freed. In this argument, the slave
master continues to have his humanity while practicing coercive
power over the slave. Debasement, the violence of power in the flesh,
in the minds of the slave masters and those who witnessed slavery
(Tocqueville witnessed slavery in his American travels), created the

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 empire of liberty

conditions for the black slave to be a certain kind of creature. Tocque-

ville writes:

Equally devoid of wants and of enjoyment, and useless to himself . . .

he quietly enjoys all the privileges of debasement. If he becomes
free, independence is often felt by him to be an heavier burden than
slavery. . . . a thousand new desires beset him, and he has not the
knowledge and energy necessary to resist them. . . . In short, he is
sunk to such a depth of wretchedness that while servitude brutalizes,
liberty destroys him.42

Thus for Tocqueville the slave has no capacity to be free even

when freed. Brutal oppression has degraded him forever, and the
condemned black body is to remain eternally outside of American
democracy. But there is for Tocqueville another reason why the
black body is condemned to exist outside the framework of Ameri-
can democracy. In an explicit reference to slavery, Tocqueville writes
about the black body as follows:

The modern slave differs from his master not only in his condition
but in his origin. You may set the Negro free, but you cannot make
him otherwise than an alien to the European. . . . we scarcely ac-
knowledge the common features of humanity in this stranger whom
slavery has brought among us. His physiognomy is in our eyes hid-
eous, his understanding weak, his tastes low; and we are almost in-
clined to look upon him as being an intermediate between man and
the brutes.43

Tocqueville approvingly cites Thomas Jefferson, who had previ-

ously written, “in the book of destiny . . . the two races will never
live in a state of equal freedom under the same government.”44 It is
clear that American democracy, for all its providential certainty,
could not grapple with the consequences of the historical wrong
enacted at its inauguration. Thus its answer was to expel the black
body. This was not just the view of Jefferson; it was the reason for
the formation of the American Colonization Society (acs) in 1816,
founded by Henry Clay and John Randolph, with the membership

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

of Daniel Webster, Busrod Washington (nephew of a Founding Fa-

ther), George Washington, and James Madison.45 Many members of
the acs thought that slavery could not be sustained but felt it was
impossible for the ex-slave to be integrated into American society.
This proposed extraordinary exclusion, permanent if possible, of
the black body from the American polity, shaped the character of
American democracy.

Another View of American Democracy

If, within the frameworks and canons of American political thought

and intellectual history, Democracy in America stands as the master
text, then W. E. B. DuBois’s 1935 book Black Reconstruction con-
tinues to be ignored. Yet this text forthrightly addresses the founda-
tional issues of American democracy. I do not wish here to engage
in any rehabilitative treatment of Black Reconstruction. Instead, I
want to think through the rich conceptual tools that DuBois uses
and in so doing offer some tentative analysis of the present moment
and of American democracy.
One hundred years after the first publication of Democracy in
America, W. E. B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction in Amer-
ica, 1860–1880. The book was not widely reviewed at the time, and,
as Nikhil Singh has observed, it was criticized for what reviewers
saw as its “hyperbolic claims” about the ex-slaves or was “clini-
cally dismantled as a romantic illusion.”46 The Caribbean intellec-
tual C. L. R. James noted that in Black Reconstruction the “Negroes
in particular had tried to carry out ideas that went beyond the pre-
vailing conceptions of bourgeois democracy.”47 If Democracy in
America was Tocqueville’s attempt to think about the democratic
revolution in Europe by locating America as the signifier of that
revolution (an attempt that allowed him to sidestep the radical dem-
ocratic movements that appeared in Europe by the 1840s), Black
Reconstruction was an acknowledgment that, although the 1840s wit-
nessed a radical experiment in democracy in Europe, the black slaves

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 empire of liberty

and workers in America had gone beyond even the boundaries of the
limits set by antislavery activists. For many antislavery activists the horizon
of Reconstruction was black male political equality. The ex-slaves broke
this limit. At the end of Black Reconstruction, DuBois writes:

The most magnificent drama in the last thousand years of human

history is the transportation of ten million human beings out of the
dark beauty their mother continent into the new-found Eldorado of
the West. They descended into Hell; and in the third century they
arose from the dead, in the finest effort to achieve democracy by the
working millions which this world had ever seen.48

Some argue, with a degree of accuracy, that Black Reconstruc-

tion is not part of the canon of American thought because its focus
on the self-activities of black slaves does not fit easily into a conven-
tional, national American narrative. I agree, but I would add one
thing. Black Reconstruction does not fit within the conventional
American narrative because it poses the most fundamental questions
about American democracy. And in posing these questions, it sup-
plies another language of democracy and its possibilities that is out-
side our current framework for thinking about democracy. Unlike
Democracy in America, Black Reconstruction makes slavery the
central question of American democracy. In the opening sentences
of his text, DuBois writes about:

How black men, coming to America in the sixteenth, seventeenth,

eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, became a central thread in the
history of the United States, at once a challenge to its democracy
and always an important part of its economic history and social
development.49

For DuBois, American democracy was challenged by the histor-

ical wrong of slavery. For him American slavery was “a matter of
both race and social condition, but the condition was limited and
determined by race.”50 The core of slavery for DuBois was that it
“represented in a very real sense the ultimate degradation of man.

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

Indeed the system was so reactionary, so utterly inconsistent with

modern progress. . . . no matter how degraded the factory hand,
he is not real estate. The tragedy of the black slave’s position was
precisely this: his absolute subjection to the individual will of an
owner.”51
Racial slavery was about the degradation of the human being. As
a system of “property in the person,” it represented the ultimate
form of domination. For such a system to exist alongside American
democracy was not a gap between reality and ideal, a gap that
could then be overcome by a series of inclusionary practices, bring-
ing formal equality to those to whom it had been denied. Rather, an
entirely new conception of democracy was required. So what would
this democracy look like and how would we name it? But we should
not run ahead of our narrative; let us see how DuBois begins to clear
a new space in which we may think about American democracy.
At the beginning of his text, DuBois makes the case for us to
begin rethinking the category of the slave. He argues that the wealth
of the United States and indeed of the Atlantic world was created by
slave labor on plantations that were the most modern productive
machines of the period. The important historical point here is not
the one made by Eric Williams in his book Capitalism and Slavery,
about the centrality of black slave labor to the process of capitalist
accumulation. Rather, DuBois is making a point about slaves as a
human social category. By calling the slaves black workers, DuBois
shifts two framing assumptions. He changes our conceptions of mo-
dernity and creates grounds for the slaves to invent their own forms
of lives wherever possible. In his classic work on the Haitian Revolu-
tion titled The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James had performed a simi-
lar process of naming, making the point that: “The slaves worked
on the land, and, like revolutionary peasants everywhere, they aimed
at the extermination of their oppressors. But working and living to-
gether in gangs of hundreds on the huge sugar-factories which cov-
ered the North Plain, they were closer to a modern proletariat than
any group of workers in existence at the time.”52 In other words,

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 empire of liberty

when one considers the writing of history from the vantage point of
those excluded from society, those who, in the words of Jacques
Rancière, constitute “a part of those who have no part,”53 the ques-
tion of naming, of the creation of new categories, becomes a central
element of that writing.
Throughout Black Reconstruction, DuBois draws us into the life
of these black workers or slaves, so that by the time they begin join-
ing the Union Army, it is obvious that they are involved in what he
calls a “general strike.” DuBois writes about the mass movement
as the war unfolds of black slaves or workers into the Union Army
in this way:

This was merely the desire to stop work. It was a strike on a wide
basis against the conditions of work. It was a general strike that in-
volved directly in the end perhaps a half million people. They wanted
to stop the economy of the plantation system, and to do that they left
the plantation system.54

But the black slave or worker had another objective: freedom. In

the most lyrical chapter of his book, one that produces a poetic and
historical knowledge of the conceptions of the slaves or workers of
freedom from the absolute domination of slavery, DuBois attempts
to produce what has been a special feature of radical black writing.
He reaches for the interiority of the ordinary slave and then repre-
sents that interiority as a form of knowledge. In this part of the text,
DuBois attempts to find both language and speech utterances that
represent a rupture. He titles the chapter “The Coming of the Lord.”
DuBois presents to us the freedom of the slaves in the poetic lan-
guage of African American religious practices. He writes:

The mass of the slaves, even the more intelligent ones, and certainly
the great group of field hands, were in a religious and hysterical fer-
vor. This was the coming of the Lord. This was the fulfillment of
prophecy and legend. It was the Golden Dawn, after chains of a
thousand years. It was everything miraculous and perfect and prom-
ising. For the first time in their life, they could travel; they could see;

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

they could change the dead level of their labor; they could talk to
friends and sit at sundown and in the moonlight, listening and im-
parting wonder-tales. . . . and above all they could stand up and
assert themselves. They need not fear the patrol; they need not even
cringe before a white face, and touch their hats. . . . Then in addi-
tion . . . they wanted to know . . . they were consumed with the de-
sire for schools. The uprising of the black man, and the pouring of
himself into organized effort for education in those years between
1861 and 1872, was one of the marvelous occurrences of the modern
world.55

Here DuBois is describing a radical process that begins to unfold

in American history, one that opens up another space for concep-
tions of democracy. The American Revolution established a limited,
male, representative, democratic system, and, as I have made clear
in the first lecture, because of racial slavery that revolution could
only invest the meaning of liberty with the narrow freight of politi-
cal liberty and political equality for white males.
When writing about revolution, Hannah Arendt makes two
points that we might do well to remember. The first point is that
“revolutions are the only political events which confront us directly
and inevitably with the problem of beginning.”56 The question we
should ask is, was the American Revolution a new beginning? We
should ask this question in part because of Arendt’s second point:
“[W]ho could deny the enormous role the social question has come
to play in all revolutions?”57 If the social was placed outside the
framework of the American Revolution and the Revolution’s focus
was on the political realm, then what kind of revolution was the
American Revolution? This is a complex question, and I will not
pretend to develop an answer in this lecture. I just wish to pose it
because there were two central questions during the American Rev-
olution: racial slavery and colonial domination. That the Revolu-
tion answered one and not the other opened up a political logic that
culminated in the Civil War. Even Arendt does not see this politi-
cal logic, the logic of the politics of the wound. She tellingly

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 empire of liberty

writes that the reason for the success of the American Revolution
was “that the predicament of poverty was absent from the American
scene. . . . They [the revolutionaries] were not driven by want, and
the revolution was not overwhelmed by them [problems of poverty].
The problem they posed was not social but political.”58 In reference
to racial slavery, Arendt states that, although there was an obvious
“incompatibility of the institution of slavery with the foundation of
freedom,” the major figures of the American Revolution were indif-
ferent toward slavery. In Arendt’s mind, this indifference was caused
“by slavery rather than on any dominance of self-interest.”59 This
is of course quite a paradox, which Arendt did not face, in part
because she wanted to demonstrate that the success of revolutions
in general remains in the political domain and that their failures are
linked to preoccupations with the social. However, for the black
slaves or workers there could be no separation of the social from
the political. They were not completing the American Revolution
during the period of radical Reconstruction. Instead, they were open-
ing up a political space in which democracy, freedom, and equality
would have a new relationship and meaning. They were empirically
engaged with the “problem of the new beginning.” They were at-
tempting a different revolution.
Before finding a language for describing this event, DuBois tells
us, in perhaps the most moving passage of Black Reconstruction,
that: “The magnificent trumpet tones of Hebrew Scripture, trans-
muted and oddly changed, became a strange new gospel. All that
was Beauty, all that was Love, all that was Truth, stood on the top
of these mad moorings and sang with the stars. A great human sob
shrieked in the wind, and tossed it tears upon the sea,—free, free,
free.”60 What DuBois is pointing us to is this. All historically cata-
strophic events, while wounding, produce cries. In hearing and lis-
tening to these cries we begin to glimpse alternative possibilities in
relation to the historically catastrophic event. With these glimpses,
a society may begin to work through its history and construct a pol-
ity that takes account of this history. This working through concerns

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

not only acts of atonement and forgiveness but also enactments of

radical transformation. Continuing in the language of the trans-
muted Hebrew Bible, DuBois tells us that with the emancipation of
the slaves, “the nation was to be purged of continual sin.” The
tragedy in DuBois’s mind is that this process was defeated and
America continued its march onward, continuously transforming
liberty into imperial freedom. So now, what was the name of the
new democracy that was possible? And how does this name help us
to think about American democracy?

Abolition Democracy

For DuBois the chief significance “of slavery in the United States to
the whole social development of America lay in the ultimate rela-
tion of slaves to democracy.”61 DuBois sees this relationship as one
that included issues of labor, property ownership, the right to vote,
and education. When describing the aftermath of the Civil War,
DuBois suggests that two theories of America clashed at that time.
In the epigraph to chapter 7, he writes the following: “How two
theories of the future of America clashed and blended after the Civil
War: the one was abolition-democracy based on freedom, intel-
ligence and power for all men; the other was industry for private
profit directed by an autocracy determined at any price to amass
wealth and power.”62 DuBois identifies abolition democracy as
the combination of three distinct streams in American thought and
political history. One stream was the transformation of “Puritan
Idealism into a theory of universal democracy . . . expressed by the
Abolitionists,” along with some labor leaders of the period and
those DuBois calls “leaders of the common people like Thaddeus
Stephens.”63 There are three elements of abolition democracy that
DuBois has in mind and that define it. These are the drive to end
racial slavery, the positioning of labor as a democratizing force in
industrial production, and a general commitment to ordinary peo-
ple and their aspirations.

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 empire of liberty

This perspective on the political meaning of abolition democracy

at once broadens the realms in which equality must now operate.
Not only is there full procedural equality between the ex-slave, the
ex-master, and the rest of the population, but this equality democ-
ratizes economic production and opens up a space for the political
speech acts of the ordinary person. DuBois argues that over time
abolition democracy was pushed “towards the conception of a dic-
tatorship of labor, although few of its advocates wholly grasped
the fact that this necessarily involved dictatorship by labor over
capital and industry.”64 Some critics argue that, because DuBois was
obviously influenced by Marxist theory at this stage of his life and
was working through it, his conception of the dictatorship of labor
is ill defined, particularly since, in the chapters on South Carolina,
Mississippi, and Louisiana, he depicts a black proletariat that es-
tablishes a quasi-dictatorship of labor. However, I would suggest a
different possible interpretation. We know that in the 1930s, Du-
Bois, though interested in Marxist theory, also felt that Marxism
was not the full answer to the issues of racial domination and class
exploitation of African Americans. In 1933, two years before the
publication of Black Reconstruction, he had already written an
article titled “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” in which he stated
that although Marxism was a “true diagnosis of the situation in
Europe . . . it must be modified in the United States of America and
especially so far as the Negro group is concerned.”65 In Black Re-
construction, DuBois attempts these modifications, forcing us to
construct a set of possible new grounds for thinking about the sig-
nificance of racial slavery to America and also providing us with
possible language for thinking about American democracy.
It seems to me that the concept of abolition democracy might pro-
vide us today with the political language to move past conventional
notions of the relationship of democracy to political equality. In
order to probe this further, let us leave DuBois for a while and briefly
review the term democracy and some of its political meanings.

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

Democracy

In conventional narratives about Western political thought and

philosophy, the concept of democracy begins in Athens. As John
Dunn has demonstrated, “from the days of Pericles to those of De-
mosthenes a full century later [democracy] was a system of citizen
self-rule.”66 What is important and often left out in narratives of
Western democracy is that Pericles’ funeral oration, given to us by
Thucydides in The History of the Peloponnesian War, was about
freedom. In other words, citizen self-rule is intimately linked to a
conception of freedom.67 I think we need to be reminded of this,
because over time democracy has shifted away from this relation-
ship and has become primarily a procedure of government. If,
within Western thought, Pericles offered democracy as a way of life
when he declared that “freedom is typical of life in our commu-
nity,” then John Dewey’s statement of 1885 that “democracy is a
form of government only because it is a form of moral and spiritual
association,” though it attempts to retrieve democracy as a way of
life, neglects to add freedom to this mix. I would argue that over
time the issues of slavery and other forms of servitude complicated
democracy in Western thought, and, when it began to reappear as a
demand in the seventeenth century, democracy required two things.
The first was a form of equality that could be realized through a
system of representative government. The second was, as Rancière
claimed, that democracy became invested with the notion of a “com-
munity of equals,” a radical demand for equality. Given this history,
while I generally agree with Ernesto Laclau that democracy func-
tions as a horizon “which establishes, at one and the same time, the
limits and terrain of the constitution of any possible object,”68 it
seems to me that in politics these limits are established by a series of
specific actions and demands at a given historical moment. Democ-
racy may be an empty signifier, but it is one that is filled at each
moment. Thus, while there is no transhistorical meaning to the term,

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 empire of liberty

it has precise meanings at specific junctures. However, our interest

in this lecture is in the question of democracy and representation.
During the period of colonial modernity, the question of repre-
sentation emerged in England with the Levellers and the Putney
Debates. These debates, as C. L. R. James makes clear, are a rich
source of ideas about the practice of a democratic politics; however,
I want to focus on how the question of the relationship between
representation and politics was posed. In the document “An Agree-
ment of the People,” the Levellers stated that peace could only be
established “upon the grounds of common right and freedom.”69
Upon this freedom they propose that “the people do of course
choose themselves a Parliament once in two years. . . . And that the
power of this and all future representatives of this nation is inferior
only to those who choose them.”70 It is obvious that the concept of
representation, as an alternative to self-rule, was influenced by the
emergence of the modern state and by the idea of sovereignty and
natural rights that could be representative and represented. In other
words, political representation was located elsewhere, outside of
common, daily life, but reflected the common community. In such
a context equality divided itself up, with one element becoming
political equality. Now the issue of representation in general is an
interesting one. When we think about representation, we typically
consider questions of culture, language, and the way in which mean-
ing is produced. Stuart Hall argues that there are two types of sys-
tems of representation. He says that the first

enables us to give meaning to the world by constructing a set of cor-

respondences or a chain of equivalences between things—people,
objects, events, abstract ideas etc. . . . [and] the second depends on
constructing a set of correspondences between our conceptual map
and a set of signs, arranged or organized into various languages
which stand for or represent those concepts.71

Regarding representative democracy that moves beyond a system

of procedural governance, such a framework of democracy at first

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

blush might mean assembling a community. However, representa-

tive democracy does not organize a series of correspondences in a
conceptual political field. Instead, it inserts a break, divorcing poli-
tics from action, from community, and, in the end, from equality. It
does this in two ways. In the first, it reduces politics and democracy
to the right of formal political equality. Secondly, it constitutes the
processes of representation within the symbolic world of institu-
tions (what Cornelius Castoriadis calls the second-order symbolic
network) as an empty sign. This empty sign, however, has the ca-
pacity to do work because at the level of politics its language is
about a relationship and an expression of the social, while that lan-
guage simultaneously obscures the social. Thus the work of repre-
sentation in liberal representative democracy is to confirm a series
of slippages that make democracy a gap. Inside that gap, there is no
political speech-act of the many. In American democracy, this gap
is filled by a series of representations that have operated after the
1960s civil rights movement within a narrative of inclusion.
Any serious reading of what has been called the civil rights move-
ment of mid-twentieth-century America indicates that this move-
ment was multilayered and that different political currents existed
within it. One current demanded a version of rights that went be-
yond political and civil rights and sought a complete overhauling of
American society. This current, represented by the ideas and work
of Martin Luther King, Jr., in his later years and by the work of the
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (sncc) and Ella Baker,
was a drive for freedom. At its core was a conception of freedom
that bundled together all rights, along with a desire to find a new
basis for living in what Martin Luther King, Jr., called the “beloved
community.” There was also another current, which focused its en-
ergies on inclusion and representation. Simply put, there have al-
ways been different currents in African American political thought
and life, including those who advocated integration with the system
and those who felt, in the words of Ella Baker, that “by and large
[the movement] had a destined date with freedom . . . not limited to

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 empire of liberty

a desire for personal freedom or even freedom for the Negro in the
South. It was repeatedly emphasized that the movement was con-
cerned with the moral implications of racial discrimination for the
whole world and the human race”72 (emphasis mine).
What is the importance of this to the issues we began with, his-
torical trauma, race, and democracy? For those individuals and
groups for whom integration was the primary objective and goal,
representation became the crucial move. However, to enter into the
“political kingdom” in this way required forgetting the historical
wrong or developing a narrative of the historical wrong as a past
event. Thus, representation as integration required establishing the
historical wrong as a narrative of historical significance but one with
little contemporary meaning for politics and democracy. In this uni-
verse, black representation becomes a way to forget the historical
wrong. Such forms of representation (that is, of representation as
only integration) remove themselves from the cries of the wound,
because from this perspective the wound has been healed or is heal-
ing. In such a context American democracy continues to neglect its
founding historical wrong as well as the consequences of that wrong.

So what is or can be the relationship between democracy and a his-

torical wrong? I will offer only the following thoughts. In the first
place, we know that one requirement of politics is speech. For Amer-
ican democracy to be transformed, one central element of speech
must be the full recognition of the historical wrong of the nation’s
founding, not as an aberration but as an event constitutive of the
inaugural event itself. Thus the historical wrong is not an event
that can be discarded or placed in a memory box and then erased.
Speaking of this historical wrong raises issues of freedom and equal-
ity. And here the question is, how does one constitute a community
of equals? At this point, we have to reengage with the ethos and
practices that pervade Black Reconstruction rather than those of

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 Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

Democracy in America. There is a radical equality in Black Recon-

struction that is missing from Democracy in America, not only be-
cause of the latter’s racial silences and assumptions of a racial hier-
archy among humans, but because the equality of Tocqueville is not
one that is worked through daily, which is invented and reinvented
and which then encompasses the social. One may ask, on what
grounds can such an equality, one that is beyond political equality
and that takes into account the social, be built? My suggestion is a
simple one. It can only be built on the common ground that we are
all human. But for the community to hold in common the fact that
we are all human as a principle of fraternity and solidarity and
therefore as the basis of politics, we will have to return to the cries
of “free, free, free,” that DuBois writes so poetically about. Jacques
Rancière argues that democracy is neither a “compromise between
interests nor the formation of a common will.”73 Democracy is about
dialogue, he argues, but dialogue must be heard to be effective, and
to be heard it must be a dialogue of equals. If radical politics begins
with the demand of “the part of no part,” then transforming Amer-
ican democracy requires working through the politics of the wound
of racial slavery and racial domination, not as a historical memory
but as a present past, while taking heed of what the cries of freedom
may mean for any project of human emancipation. In the end, the
current form of American democracy is integral to the domestic
political guise of the empire of liberty. Standing on the platform of
the cries of freedom, we begin not to create liberty trees but to con-
struct ways of life that make us human.

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[3]
death, power, violence,
and new sovereignties

Do not be deceived by the multiplicity of sounds that ring and jingle like laughter. . . .
Death speaks with a thousand whispers, but a single voice. — r o ge r m a is

We must complete our life before our death. — m ic h e l f o u c a u lt

If any detainee refused to comply with a lawful order to weed, the plan was that two
warders should be allocated to that detainee and, by holding his hands, physically make
him pull weeds from the ground . . . once such token work had been performed by the
detainee he would have considered that he had broke his Mau Mau oath which had, by
superstitious dread, previously prevented him from cooperating.
—rep o rt o f the co mmi ttee t o i n v es t igat e d is c ip l in a r y
ch arg es ag a i n s t o ffi cer s o f t he k e n ya p r is o n s e r v ic e

i want to thank all of you for coming, particularly those of you

who have been following the series. We can now safely say that one
of the critical questions that these lectures continue to focus on is
what one may call the constituting of subjectivities. To keep the
various threads of these lectures clear, I want to quickly draw some
connections between the first two lectures and this one. I have been
arguing that in our present moment empire as power has estab-
lished a trajectory in which it seeks to become a totality. Part of
empire’s drive today is to capture desire in order to create a political
field of regularity for our subjectivities. From within the framework
of this drive, self-regulation functions as a form of domination.
 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

This self-regulation is integral to what I will describe as the political

field of regularity, which occurs under the sign of freedom. This
freedom is typically called liberty, and so I have argued that we cur-
rently live under a configuration of power that operates as an em-
pire of liberty.
My second major thesis has been about the possibility of de-
mocracy’s being an empty signifier and how sometimes it has been
conceptualized as lack and an entity that must be filled. In this re-
gard democracy becomes a series of prefixes that then define what
is being fulfilled (representative democracy, direct democracy, and
so on). Focusing on American democracy, I have argued that the
social structures of racial slavery as historical wound mean that the
story of democracy told by Tocqueville in Democracy in America is
woefully inadequate. Instead I have suggested that W. E. B. DuBois’s
Black Reconstruction offers a richer and more productive account of
the possibilities of democracy in America, not only because he pays
attention to slavery but because he makes an attempt to unearth his-
torical knowledge of the slave’s understanding and practices of free-
dom. This attempt opens up a different narrative of democracy and
its relationship to freedom, suggesting another form of democracy
that DuBois called abolition democracy. It is of course critical to
my main argument to note that democracy is an important element
of the empire of liberty. However, this is a democracy of political
equality and voting, a democracy that constitutes itself as a form of
political life that we may call constitutional representativeness.
In the second lecture, I also began to turn to the body. With this
third lecture, I wish to foreground this concern. If the empire of
liberty operates through signs of democracy and liberty within a
political field of regularity, it has not abandoned violence. Hence in
this lecture I want to pay some attention to this matter. I will be
doing so from three perspectives. First, I pay some attention to issues
of genocide. Second, I look at the question of torture and its possi-
ble relationship to the empire of liberty. Then in the final segment,
I make an ethnographic shift to review the practices of violence in

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 empire of liberty

the postcolonial space of Jamaica, and I leave behind a bit of my

preoccupation with empire. I make this detour because the question
of violence is a complex one and should be examined from many
angles. All three of the topics that I review are different in many
ways, but, by looking at them together, I seek to understand vio-
lence not simply as an action of instrumentality, nor as a practice
that works through a means-end logic, but as one face of power
that in some instances becomes power itself. Having presented a
map of this sort, let me open my reflections with a few remarks on
the most spectacular kind of violence, genocide.

Genocide

We know that the term genocide was coined in 1944 by Raphael

Lemkin from the Latin genos-cide. Translated, it means the killing
of a race. Genocide is about the systematic deployment of death as
perpetual motion. As an interview with one of the killers in the
Rwandan genocide makes clear: “During that killing season we rose
earlier than usual, to eat lot of meat, and we went up to the soccer
field at around nine or ten o’clock. The leaders would grumble
about latecomers, and we would go off on the attack. Rule number
one was to kill. There was no rule number two. It was an organiza-
tion without complications.”1 Conventionally defined as the sys-
tematic killing of a race, genocide entails actions calculated to bring
about the physical destruction of the entirety of or a significant
section of an identifiable human population. Genocidal actions are
not random acts of violence, and they require political organization,
mobilization, and ideological justification. In other words, there are
always political objectives involved in genocide, including the cre-
ation of an order in which a so-called other is murdered and thus
bodily expelled from the polity. When thinking about the emer-
gence of the word genocide, we should note that Lemkin regarded
genocide as connected to colonialism.2 There are many reasons for
this. One is of course that colonial power operates by physically re-

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

moving human populations, murdering large groups and construct-

ing racial hierarchies. Colonial power was always about race and
space, and colonialism was embedded within the framework of a
racial, biologistic conception of world history in which some human
populations were not necessary for the survival of the fittest or for
civilization. Those unsuitable could be, and were, expelled from the
polity or might remain as inferior beings dominated by those con-
sidered civilized. Hannah Arendt makes the point that genocide as-
sumes that some human beings are superfluous. We have noted that
this assumption has its source in Europe’s colonial past, making the
idea of superfluousness one of the ideological justifications neces-
sary for genocide. In the past century, the world has witnessed many
genocides, including the 1904 genocide of the Herero people in the
nation-state of Nambia by colonialist Germany, the Armenian geno-
cide occurring from 1915 through 1918, the Holocaust, and the
Rwandan genocide of 1994. In this lecture, I am not going to focus
on each of these genocidal events; instead, I wish to pay some at-
tention to a few thinkers who have reflected on the relationship
between genocide and power.
For Hannah Arendt, the event of genocide occurs in conditions
under which power is attempting to exercise itself as a totality. She
makes the additional point that genocide occurs when power seeks
to eradicate human plurality. Arendt notes that genocide is about
trying to create the conditions for “a total explanation of the past,
total knowledge of the present and total and absolute predication
for the future.”3 In this drive for totality, there is slippage and even-
tual collapse of the distinctions between history and nature. The
result is a fusion of the laws of history and the laws of nature into
a unitary movement.
It is this drive for totality that interests us. What are its features and
how does it reproduce itself into violence and the making of death?
Genocide requires spectacle, and even though we may find this difficult
to grasp, it also needs mass participation, even if the individuals who
engage in genocidal activity act out of fear for their own lives.4 And

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 empire of liberty

here the participation is at two levels. The first level requires the tacit
support of significant segments of the population, particularly when
genocidal action is actively carried out by a specially created group
or in designated locations. The second level occurs when significant
segments of the population themselves become killers. As difficult
as it is for us to contemplate, given our moral antipathy to geno-
cide, it is within the spectacle of violence enacted through genocide
that we begin to understand death as a flow and the creation of
death-worlds. Therefore, even though violence and in particular
genocidal violence seem to exist beyond the human imagination
and, sometimes, beyond our comprehension, we have an obliga-
tion, in the words of Susan Sontag, to “take in what human beings
are capable of doing to one another.”5
As we think about genocide, and thinking about genocide is
something we must do, let us spend some time with the statement
of the general who was responsible for the Herero genocide. When
discussing his methods and rationale for this genocide, General Lo-
thar von Trotha, the key figure of the genocidal campaign, stated,
“The exercise of violence with crass terrorism and even with grue-
some murders is my policy. I destroy the African tribes with streams
of blood and streams of money. Only following this cleansing can
something new emerge, which will remain.”6 What General Trotha
stated with stark clarity is that genocidal violence is about cleans-
ing, the creation of an order based on a notion of purity. Whether
it is the extermination of an ethnic group or a religious group, the
purpose is to cleanse the social body. In order to do this, the social
order to be purified must have within it a population that can be
killed with ideological legitimacy. So there are now two things that
we should reflect on for a while.
Foucault tells us that historically sovereign power exercised its
sovereignty through a right over life. He notes also that when, in
nineteenth-century Europe, this right was transformed into the right
to “make live and let die,” it still belonged to the sovereign. What
genocidal violence does is to disperse that right over life. It is true

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

that genocidal violence is done on command and is therefore orga-

nized, but its logic is to create the conditions under which murder
becomes a legitimate form of activity and a new world of death can
be constructed. This new death-world is partly constructed by the
state that organizes the genocide but also assumes a different legiti-
macy when murder is enacted by the significant segments of a popu-
lation. Listen again to an interview with a Rwandan killer: “The
intimidators made the plans and whipped up enthusiasm; the shop-
keepers paid and provided transportation; the farmers prowled and
pillaged. For the killings, though, everybody had to show up blade
in hand and pitch in for a decent stretch of work.”7 Killing now
becomes a day of work. It is viewed as part of an everyday fact of
life within what was called in Rwanda the “killing season.”
Arendt, in her report on the Eichmann trial, pays attention to
the ordinariness of Eichmann. She writes that despite all the efforts
of the prosecution, “everybody could see that this man was not
a ‘monster,’ but it was difficult indeed not to suspect that he was
a clown.”8 When killing becomes ordinary work, the “banality of
evil” is established. These two cases, which we have briefly referred
to here, one of a quasi–state official and the other of an ordinary
subject, demonstrate the ways in which murder becomes ordinary.
And, as always is the case at the level of action, language is central
to making death and murder everyday realities. Again we listen to
a Rwandan who participated in the genocide: “We had to work
fast, and we got no time off, especially not Sundays—we had to fin-
ish up. We cancelled all ceremonies. Everyone was hired at the same
level for a single job—to crush all the cockroaches.”9 Cockroaches,
this was the name given to the Tutsis. This was the marker that
made them different, less than human. We should also note that the
speaker does not talk about killing cockroaches but instead about
crushing cockroaches, evoking a different image. One crushes a
cockroach as an insect, to get rid of it, to clean one’s house of pos-
sible contamination. Here language is used to mask murder, as acts
of genocide become work. The substitution and masking operating

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 empire of liberty

here are important in the creation of a legitimate death-world for

those enacting murder.
When writing about the Holocaust, Arendt details the processes
by which it was enacted. She writes:

Last came the death factories—and they all died together, the young
and the old, the weak and the strong, the sick and the healthy; not as
people, not as men and women, children and adults . . . not as good
and bad, beautiful and ugly—but brought down to the lowest com-
mon denominator of organic life itself, plunged into the darkest abyss
of primal equality, like cattle, like matter, like things that had neither
body nor soul, nor even a physiognomy upon which death could
stamp its seal.10

The violence of genocide is performed by creating conditions in

which death is absolute. There is no redeeming feature to death for
those who die by genocidal violence. Some time ago, Franz Kafka
made the point that “death and only death” gives meaning to life.
But genocidal death is a death whose finality is of one who has no
life. Thus, while at many funerals we speak of the life of the de-
ceased in a ritual that marks life, and then we mourn, in the death
of genocidal violence there is no life to mark, since all life has been
erased to create the conditions of the violence. For those murdered
in what Primo Levi calls “gigantic death machines,”11 death is the
final act in a subject’s inability to be, while for those who enact the
death chamber or the killing season, death by genocidal violence is
about purification. Levi writes, “Even the manner of killing (chosen
after careful experiment) was openly symbolic. The gas prescribed
and used was the same used for disinfecting ships’ holds and sites
invaded by bugs or lice.”12 In this process of purification through
the creation of a death-world, new boundaries are created and
maintained by terror. Arendt compellingly suggests that genocidal
violence is integral to totalitarian terror. However, this terror is
often not outside the law but functions inside it and is given legiti-
macy as authorized death.

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

So how do we grapple with genocidal violence and its relation-

ship to power? Regarding violence, Arendt makes the point that
violence is the opposite of power. She notes further that when “vio-
lence appears, power is in jeopardy.”13 Splitting power and violence
into two distinct entities, Arendt argues that although they are dis-
tinct, “they usually appear together.” Here Arendt is working with
a conception of power in which political authority has a legitimate
monopoly on force. In this paradigm, violence is an instrument that
follows a means-end logic. However, what happens when this kind
of violence is not only an instrument but an integral part of a re-
gime of rule, when death and terror (not fear) become the singular-
ity of power? What happens when death is not the means-end but
the actual process itself? Or to put this another way, what happens
when power operates as surplus power in a mode of regular consis-
tency, when violence and death are not interruptions of routine but
are themselves the routine? In such situations, there is no gap be-
tween means and ends. Violence does not become an expression of
power but takes on the mantle of power itself. I would argue that
the event of genocidal violence and the colonial project practice vio-
lence as power in similar ways. For the former, the performance of
power as violence has historically been of relatively short duration,
while for the latter, power as might as right, power as the sword,
operates historically over a longer time frame. The matter of tem-
porality is important, but not as a means of comparison of relative
oppression, of deciding which system or event was more evil. (Such
a discussion has no real meaning or substance. On what basis do we
compare piles of dead bodies?) Instead, when thinking about the
sword of colonial power and about genocidal violence, we need to
examine how technologies of violence are codified, reappear, and
repeat themselves.
When Hannah Arendt critiques Frantz Fanon on the issue of vio-
lence, she fails to recognize that certain kinds of violence collapse
into power. Arendt’s reading of Fanon’s chapter on violence in The
Wretched of the Earth is superficial because she argues that Fanon

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 empire of liberty

agrees with “glorified violence for violence’ sake.”14 Any serious

reading of Fanon suggests that this is not so, but that is not the point
of this lecture. Rather, regarding Arendt’s assessment of Fanon, I
suggest that what was at work in her thought was the absence of
the body as a possible site within the political field. At the sites
where violence operates as power, not only is death perpetual mo-
tion, but the regular crushing of life from the body becomes the
crushing of animated life. Thus death has a political purpose when
it becomes the ultimate negative ground of the human. To put this
another way, a regime of extreme violence has to enact regular
practices of death because its purpose is the absolute negation of
the human life-form in its plurality. The killing of the body, whether
in the intimate spaces of the villages of Rwanda or in the death
camps of the Nazis, makes the body upon which death is visited a
materiality and a surface, confirming what Mary Douglas makes
clear, that there is no “body that does not involve at the time a so-
cial dimension.”15
I would argue, therefore, that because of this social dimension,
Foucault’s statement that the “body is also directly involved in a
political field” is accurate. Elaine Scarry makes the same point
about pain and torture. She observes that “it is the intense pain that
destroys a person’s self and world.”16 Thus, when power acts upon
the body, the primary aims of torture are to destroy the “meaning-
making capacity of the tortured and . . . to replace it with the mean-
ings of the torturer.”17 Thus the body as animated life becomes an
object to be seized and mastered. Regimes of extreme violence dom-
inate through a form of power that operates in the flesh.
Let me summarize my main argument before I move on to the
issue of torture. I have suggested an interpretation in which vio-
lence is not an instrument of power but instead, in extreme regimes
(for example, a state that practices genocide), is a form of power
that itself creates a death-world. This is of course a different con-
ception from that found in the conventional social science literature
on the subject. In this literature, beginning with the work of Max

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

Weber, a preoccupation with power centers on notions of political

authority, political obligation, and a command-obedience model, or,
as in the work of Talcott Parsons and others, on power as a “spe-
cific mechanism operating to bring about changes . . . in the pro-
cesses of social interaction.”18
Michel Foucault disrupts these conceptions of power and argues
that it may be productive to ask “What happens?” in order to “un-
dertake a critical investigation of the thematics of power.”19 By ask-
ing how power is exercised in contexts of extreme regimes, I have
posited the possibility that violence, particularly genocidal violence,
is power. Of course this position runs counter to Foucault’s posi-
tion, since he makes a distinction between a relationship of violence
and one of power, which he says “bends, it breaks, it destroys, or
closes off all possibilities.”20 For Foucault the capacity of power is
based upon a relationship in which a subject emerges. His is an at-
tempt to understand the liberal project. On the other hand, I wish
to suggest that bending, breaking, destroying, and closing off all
possibilities also demand a certain kind of relationship, one in which
total domination through force is an objective. In this regard, it is
important to remember that one way to examine power is not to
separate its methods and actions from its outcomes. Here I am not
speaking about intent but rather about practices. It is through these
lenses that I have suggested another way to think about the relation-
ship between violence and power.
Second, I have also argued that one objective of this kind of power
is to create a political order based upon purification. Third, I have sug-
gested, as have Arendt and others, that the technologies of genocidal
violence are to be found in colonial power. We need to begin to see and
think about genocidal violence, as unthinkable as it is and as difficult
as it may be to contemplate, in order to find language to describe how
it operates as a form of power that is not an aberration but one possi-
ble, logical consequence of power that can be deployed on the body by
crushing it. Let me now turn to the issue of torture and to contempo-
rary features of an empire of liberty.

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 empire of liberty

Torture and Violence

In 1982 the liberal political theorist Judith Shklar posited that cru-
elty was “irrevocably” the first vice.21 She noted that “cruelty as
the willful inflicting of physical pain on a weaker being in order to
cause anguish and pain . . . is a wrong done entirely to another
creature”22 (emphasis in original). Shklar then suggested that one
element of liberalism was its avoidance of cruelty. Since the onset of
the so-called war on terror, the issue of an extreme form of system-
atic cruelty—torture—has opened up a series of discussions and
debates. In the debate, one line of thinking has emerged that has
forcefully argued for the necessity of “dirty hands.”23 The central
assumption of this argument is the idea of the ticking bomb. Put
simply, this idea holds that the extraction of information and neces-
sary intelligence in order to avert a disaster might require methods
of torture. David Luban has pointed to a liberal theory of torture in
which the argument of necessity creates grounds for the reinterpre-
tation of laws.24 Luban accurately notes that the “self-conscious
aim of torture is to turn its victim into someone who is isolated,
overwhelmed, terrorized, and humiliated . . . to strip away from its
victims all the qualities of human dignity.”25
There are two other elements of torture, pain, and the cruelty of
humiliation that we should examine. Elaine Scarry has made the point
that “in serious pain the claims of the body utterly nullify the claims
of the world.”26 In the context of torture and interrogation, the pur-
ported purpose of pain is to break the individual. The purpose is to
make the body unable to resist. Thus it is not an accident that the
various memoranda written by members of the Bush administration
justifying torture often did so under the rubric of counter-resistance
techniques. We should note that in perhaps one of the most bizarre
examples of how some members of the Bush administration viewed
torture, the former secretary of defense issued handwritten approval
for what were called aggressive techniques of counter-resistance. In
his approval of the proposed aggressive techniques, Donald Rums-

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

feld wrote, “However, I stand for 8–10 hours a day. Why is standing
limited to 4 hours?”27
Foucault observes that the decline of the public spectacle of ex-
ecution in Europe coincided with the formal disappearance of tor-
ture, thus making “punishment . . . the most hidden part of the penal
process.”28 The removal of torture from the public realm created
a whole set of new technologies of punishment. Foucault writes,
“Physical pain, the pain of the body itself, is no longer the constitu-
ent element of penalty. From being the art of unbearable sensations,
punishment has become an economy of suspended rights.”29 Even
though punishment has been separated from physical pain, I want
to suggest that the practices of punishment as torture haunt us
today. It may be important to think about torture not as a practice
that occurs during interrogation but as a form of punishment of a
body that has been excluded from the mainstream.30 This means
that in the so-called war on terror, the victims of torture were pun-
ished both for who they were and for what the torturers perceived
that they had done. To practice torture, a set of discursive proce-
dures has to be followed, since subjecting bodies to pain requires
that they be excluded from the norm. A series of arguments pro-
mulgated by the Bush administration was central to the creation of
the conditions for torture in the contemporary empire of liberty. At
the core of these arguments were the conceptions that Afghanistan
was a failed state and that members of the Taliban militia or those
associated with it did not have to be accorded the rights of the Ge-
neva conventions. The words of the memorandum on this matter
make clear the reason why this was not considered necessary. The
memorandum declares that a failed state constituted a “condition
of statelessness and therefore was not a High Contracting Party to
the Geneva Conventions for at least that period of time.”31
The point I wish to make here is that circumstances of torture,
like those of death and genocidal violence, require the creation of a
set of discursive premises rooted in hierarchical systems of human
classification. These grounds have a history and a set of practices

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that we need to remember; otherwise we see torture and forms of

violence as aberrations rather than as possible outcomes of histori-
cal logics that may haunt a society. For example, when we grapple
with torture in American democracy, it is important that we reflect
on the judgment of Chief Justice Roger Taney of the U.S. Supreme
Court in the Dred Scott case, in which he declared blacks as “hav-
ing no rights that whites were bound to respect.” In a very impor-
tant sense, the historical wound of racial slavery continues to be
central to the constitution of questions of punishment and torture
in American democracy.
In his introduction to Colin Dayan’s book titled The Story of
Cruel and Unusual, Jeremy Waldron noted that “when we abol-
ished slavery, we did not abolish it unconditionally, but with the
Thirteenth Amendment qualification that slavery is okay for pris-
oners.”32 In her book, Dayan successfully argues that the “ghost of
slavery still haunts our legal language and holds the prison system
in thrall.”33 What is interesting is that much of the current debate
about torture ignores this ghost.34
One of the themes running through these lectures is colonial
power. I have attempted to suggest that we cannot think adequately
about modernity unless we understand that there was an intimate
relationship between coloniality and modernity. So intimate was this
relationship that I, together with others, have spoken about a his-
torical process that may properly be called “colonial modernity.”
From this perspective, I want to close my discussion of torture by
reflecting briefly on the Algerian War of Independence.
The controversies over the meaning of one of the fiercest armed
struggles for national liberation continue to swirl in our contem-
porary politics. After the tragedy of 9/11 and the discussions about
mounting a war on terror, Gillo Pontecorvo’s remarkable film The
Battle of Algiers became required viewing at the Pentagon. What
we are less aware of on this side of the Atlantic is that in February
2005, the French government proposed a law under which French
school curricula would be required to depict French colonialism in

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

a positive light. At the same time, the French state rehabilitated

members of the Organization de l’Armee Secrete, some of whom
had been convicted for crimes during the Algerian War of Indepen-
dence. My point here is that, in many ways, the event of the Alge-
rian War is a marker within the twentieth century. It is a marker
that will not be fully settled until questions about colonial power
and its relationship to torture are settled in some fashion.
In the nineteenth century, Algeria was invaded by France, and
by the 1870s it was a French colony. In the 1950s, the Algerians
launched a war against French colonial occupation. In May 1958,
French paratroopers surrounded the Casbah with the objective of
breaking a widely supported strike and destroying, where possible,
the internal leadership of the National Liberation Front (fln). The
key French general in charge was Jacques Massu. It is now widely
acknowledged that in this war torture was a common practice. In a
remarkable work on torture practices during the war, Marnia Laz-
reg writes, “Nevertheless, the professionalization of torture con-
veyed the message of its acceptance as a war weapon on par with
training and shooting. . . . torture was thus pulled out of the shad-
owy semantic domain in which it lived, and thrust into the forefront
of everyday life. . . . it reached deep into the military body.”35
All the discursive procedures were put in place as the Algerian
body was punished. It has been recognized that torture did not yield
massive intelligence information during this war. Lazreg observes
that “the systematic use of torture during the Algerian War did not
help to win the war. . . . The Algerian case reveals that the demo-
cratic state is in constant danger of allowing its pre-democratic core
to emerge and engage in violations of laws.”36 In the American case,
and, I would argue, in the French case as well, there is no return
to any predemocratic status of what constitutes an imperial state.
An imperial state functions through many repertoires but is not a
democratic state unless democracy is narrowly defined as political
equality for those populations that belong to the mother country. We
therefore need to see torture as one form of violence that is practiced

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and deployed by power, not as an aberration, but as one of power’s

possible logics. In many ways, I have been arguing for us to under-
stand these moments and practices as both contingent and histori-
cally shaped.
I now come to the third segment of this lecture. I hope to make
some points about violence and power by presenting the results of
an ethnographic study on the practices of violence in the postcolony
of Jamaica. If, in the first two segments of this lecture, I focused on
violence that is sponsored and instigated by the state, I now exam-
ine violence that is enacted by a group loosely called the urban poor.
This shift in focus is necessary in part because my preoccupation
with subjectivities requires thinking about agency as a material prac-
tice. Here I am always reminded that Friedrich Nietzsche once re-
marked, “the doing is everything.” In thinking about this shift, it
has become clear to me that violence enacted by non-state actors
can become, as Allen Feldman observes, “a self-legitmating sphere
of social discourse and transaction points.”37 What I think is im-
portant within this sphere is the way in which the social ontological
question about life is posed. So now let us turn to the Caribbean.

Violence in the Jamaican Postcolony

Violence is perhaps the single most discussed and vexing issue in

many Caribbean societies today. The number of individuals killed
in Jamaica and St. Lucia, the bomb attacks in Trinidad, and the
growing number of persons violently killed in Guyana speak not of
a mundane crisis in the Caribbean postcolony but of a crisis we
have yet to name. This is not a crisis of hegemony or the end of the
Bandung project, nor can it be understood, as I suggested a few
years ago, as one of “language, life and labor.”38 Crisis as phenom-
enon morphs and, if not resolved, takes on a life of its own, repro-
ducing itself in different forms. In such contexts, one element of a
conjunctural crisis can become a long-term feature of a society, shift-
ing some of the central grounds and practices through which a human

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

community reproduces itself and its ways of life over time. When
reflecting on violence in Jamaica and its relationship to power, I am
working through power’s capillary forms of existence, as a force
field that exists in ways other than its conventional state forms. As
I review these forms, I suggest, following Foucault, that power is a
productive force. Thus, within the urban Jamaican space that I will
describe, power operates productively, creating geographical spaces
of violence and death while remapping sovereignty.39
The construction of these geographical spaces not only sustains
subjectivities but does many other things, only two of which I will
mention. First, it forces us once again to rethink the relationship
between violence and power. Second, it forces us to think about the
complexities of subaltern counterhegemonic practices, the genealogy
of those practices, and their capacity to change.

Power, Coercion, and Hegemony:

From Racial Slavery to Tutelage (The Jamaican Case)
It is neither the intention nor the purpose of this lecture to en-
gage in an extensive unraveling of the history of nineteenth-century
Jamaica. However, because my arguments about the relationship of
power to violence suggest a series of shifts in how Jamaican society
is conventionally studied, so it is important to review a few critical ele-
ments in the historical construction of power in Jamaican society.
The abolition of racial slavery in colonial Jamaica was a water-
shed for the forms of rule deployed by British colonial power.
Racial slavery under British colonialism combined four kinds of
violence. Achille Mbembe has observed that colonial sovereignty
“rested on three sorts of violence . . . the founding violence . . . [the
violence of] legitimation . . . [and] the third form of violence . . .
falling well short of . . . ‘war,’ [recurring] again and again in the
most banal and ordinary situations.”40 However, in those instances
in which racial slavery was combined with colonial power, power
also rested on a fourth leg of violence. If colonial power conven-
tionally ruled through projects of civilization, violent conquest,

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 empire of liberty

tutelage, or assimilation, racial slavery required a kind of absolute

domination in which the body of the slave was not only property
but a thing, a res that was outside the social and political mecha-
nisms of the community. The slave existed in what Orlando Pat-
terson has called a state of “social death.” However, as I have stated
before, the slave’s human life was reduced. This reduction was not
“bare life” but rather life made superfluous.41 All this we have re-
hearsed before, so W. E. B. DuBois’s succinct formulation in Black
Reconstruction that Atlantic slavery represented a form of domi-
nation that rested on the “submergence below the arbitrary will of
any sort of individual” continues to serve us well.42
As a form of domination, the system of racial slavery deployed
technologies of rule that targeted the slave body. The objective of
this kind of power was not to turn human beings into subjects but
into objects and things. In this context, violence was deployed to
break and destroy, to remove possibilities and to act immediately
upon the person through the body.
The abolition of racial slavery shifted this mode of power in the
colonial Caribbean, changing its terrain from a singular focus on the
body to an art of creating subjects. But we should not be too san-
guine about this shift because, as Diana Paton has pointed out, the
shift did not mean the end of certain kinds of punishment. Flogging
was reintroduced in the 1850s, and the treadmill became a common
feature of plantation life in the postemancipation Caribbean.43
There were two principal technologies of colonial rule in Ja-
maica’s postemancipation period, besides colonial violence. The first
was Christianity (hence the extensive deployment of Christian mis-
sionaries during the period), and the second was the vigorous at-
tempt to turn the ex-slave into a wage laborer. Combined, these two
forms of rule sought to create a moral culture that was modeled in
part on an imaginary Victorian male respectability, what Horace
Russell has called so felicitously the “Christian Black.”44 The cre-
ation of this subject provided the ground for power to act outside
of naked violence. Power became, in the words of Michel Foucault,

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

a condition for the “management of possibilities.”45 It is of course

now well documented that the ex-slaves captured the Christianity
of the missionaries and produced a number of Afro-Christian reli-
gious practices.46 The emergence of the religious practices of Myal-
ism and Zionism, what the late Phillip Curtin described as the Afri-
canization of the 1861 Christian Revival, was a process in which
Afro-Jamaican subaltern subjects staked out a new ground for fash-
ioning their own humanness. Central to this was the emergence of
what Diane Austin-Broos has called a logic of affliction. Writing
about revivalism, she observes that it was:

not simply a “mixing” of elements but rather a redefinition of the

form of Christianity that the missionaries had brought to Jamaica. . . .
[it] was not simply a nativistic movement . . . it was rather a complex
of rite and belief that sought to sustain the logic of affliction by as-
similating elements of Christianity to it47 (emphasis mine).

Two things about this logic of affliction are critical. Over time
this logic became an integral part of a series of narratives about the
meanings of black suffering in the New World. These meanings
were eventually bolstered by a reinterpretation of the biblical story
of the Exodus.48 Second, the logic of affliction reemerged in various
periods in the political language of the Jamaican subaltern as “suf-
ferers” (noun). At this point we are running ahead of our story, but
we should note that one of the main features of the present is the
erosion and aggressive rejection of this logic by many young males.
Indeed I would argue that currently the logic of affliction has been
superseded by a different understanding of the Afro-Jamaican sub-
altern self.
The strivings of Creole nationalism culminated in the island’s
political and constitutional independence in 1962. However, it is
critical to observe that, at the level of the Afro-Jamaican subaltern,
while Creole nationalism consolidated itself into a national, state
form and proclaimed national sovereignty, the politico-religious doc-
trines and practices of Rastafari offered an alternative. Rastafari

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 empire of liberty

emerged from three sources: an international, diasporic, black reli-

gious tradition; a series of contestations between elements of reviv-
alism and early black religious doctrines that reread the Bible in
order to discover the causes and meanings of black suffering in the
New World; and, finally, growing gender conflict between Afro-
Jamaican male subalterns and females who joined in Pentecostalism
and revivalism.49 This latter group was located socially as exploited
domestic workers in middle-class homes.50 Rastafari was to play
an important role in the radicalization of the Jamaican political
moment in the 1960s. Indeed it was the central force behind the
cultural forms that made powerful attempts to refashion popular
culture. But Rastafari was not the only source of subaltern rebellion,
because alongside it emerged the figure of the Rude Bwoy.

The Rudie
Garth White, in his seminal essay on this figure, observes that the
“Rude Bwoy is that person, native, who is totally disenchanted
with the ruling system; who generally descended from the ‘African’
in the lower class and who is now armed with ratchets, other cut-
ting instruments and with increasing frequency nowadays, with
guns and explosives.”51 Perry Henzell’s film The Harder They Come
provides us with a visual representation of this figure. The film puts
together the two male subaltern exemplars of early postcolonial
resistance in Jamaica, Rastafari in the figure of Ras Daniel Heart-
man and Ivan in the figure of Jimmy Cliff. Both are rebellious, but
the terms of their rebellion are different.52 For Ivan, rebellion is cap-
tured in the song “You Can Get It If You Really Want,” while for
the Rastafari, rebellion is captured by the stoicism of the plaintive
song “Many Rivers to Cross.”
It is accurate to point out that violence was part of the repertoire
of rebellion of the Rude Bwoy. However, I want to suggest that this
was not just the internalized violence of Fanon, nor the violence of
the lumpen proletariat preying upon itself and its community, but
rather violence as a strategic instrument that was deployed as an

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

end. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon notes that violence is a

force that makes the native “fearless and restores self-respect.”53
For the Rude Bwoy violence was often a means of creating and
safeguarding zones of black masculinity that were at odds with the
hegemonic conceptions of the Jamaican nation-state. It was deployed
to construct what the Caribbean intellectual George Beckford calls
“a mode of life.”54 It marked out a different set of normative terms
for this subaltern group’s self-conception and in particular empha-
sized the notion of respect. I want to suggest that what was happen-
ing was the following: postcolonial Jamaican society was embedded
within a hegemonic framework in which the black majority was
viewed as outside, as the great unwashed who could not be trained
or civilized. In a profound sense the class, color, and racial schema
of Jamaican society located the urban and rural black underclass as
unworthy. This was both an epistemological problem of framing
and a problem of social ontology. Or to put the case in clear Jamai-
can nation-language, and in the words of the musician Peter Tosh,
the Jamaican social system was a “shits-tem.” Inside that frame-
work, dignity and respect were human qualities that male subaltern
figures attempted to carve out for themselves. This was the over-
arching desire of the Rude Bwoy, a self-fashioning that would com-
mand respect and dignity on his own terms. But we know that all
material practices are fluid. Over time the phenomenon of the Rude
Bwoy developed into gangs, and many of them became attached to
the Jamaican two-party political system. But there was no easy slide
from rebellion to accommodation, incorporation, and eventual
transformation into something else. When they were first courted
by the political parties, many Rude Bwoys expressed ideas that
drew from Rastafari doctrine and, in some instances, the Cuban
Revolution. For example, the posters and iconography that deco-
rated many of the small shack dwellings of members of this group
ranged from pictures of Haile Selassie (the human-God figure in
Rastafari doctrine), Che Guevara, Fidel Castro, and icons of the
American Black Power movement to the Communist hammer and

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 empire of liberty

sickle. When they became integrated into the two-party system, many
initially saw themselves as warriors or soldiers. Integration into the
two-party system was accomplished at two levels. First they became
a protective force for communities that waged political war against
each other. Second they became over time the central figures respon-
sible for the distribution of various forms of public works, thereby
embedding themselves firmly within the practices of political client-
age. When this process had been consolidated, their transformation
from rebellious figures into political enforcers was complete.
In general, therefore, it is safe to say that eventually the Rude
Bwoy was transformed into a political-party warrior. It is at this
point that we should turn to the understanding of political violence
in some urban communities.

War, Violence, and Party Politics

In his 1977 study of violence and politics in Jamaican society,
Terry Lacy argues that one of the critical issues facing that society
in the 1960s and early 1970s was an “internal security situation.”
He poses this dilemma as central to the prospects for political change.
Lacy documents how the new ruling elite of Jamaica denounced
“the general attitude of lawlessness; maintained armed vigil; called
for flogging in schools.”55 He then suggests that the group that he
identifies as the lumpen proletariat was responsible for violence and
that its activities created disquiet on the part of the new ruling elite.
He notes:

This was what the national bourgeoisie called a “criminal” or “hoo-

ligan” element. Trench Town, Denham Town, Back O’Wall, Moon-
light City—these names of parts of Western Kingston conveyed im-
ages of youth gangs, political gangs, Rastafarians, of Prince Henry’s
gang, The Max gang, the Blue Mafia, The Dunkirk gang, . . . the
Vikings or the Roughest and the Toughest.56

Lacy ends his argument on violence by stating that the “lumpen—

proletariat were the primary source of violence against the whole

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

political system whereas over the decade other social classes were
the primary source within the system”57 (emphasis in original). There
is not enough time in this lecture to engage in arguments about the
ambiguous radical or revolutionary agency of the so-called lumpen
proletariat or the power of this designation for the urban Jamaican
poor in a postcolonial economy. Instead I want to focus on violence
from a different angle: not violence as an incipient force of insur-
gency but rather violence as a way of constructing rule in local com-
munities and as a form of disorder deployed to produce and create
order in a localized community space.
There is no longer any dispute in Jamaican political discourse
over the historic links between the Jamaican two-party political
system and the emergence of political war and a politics of violence.
The current debate instead concerns the degree of continuing con-
nection. One question has perplexed many commentators and
radical activists. How was it possible for urban and rural oppressed
groups to be so divided that they ended up engaging in violence
against each other? Why was class solidarity so lacking and seem-
ingly impossible to construct? There are many possible answers to
this, but one lies in the two-party political system’s construction of
the practice of mainstream politics. In this practice, not only was
clientage a “mechanism by which to institutionalize a power struc-
ture” alongside a politics of scarce benefits, but the Jamaican politi-
cal party system was also able to construct and maintain a politics
of difference based upon one of the oldest political stratagems, the
division of friends from enemies.58
When developing his conception of the political, the conservative
German legal and political theorist Carl Schmitt draws on Machia-
vellian notions of the political order and argues that “the specific
political distinction to which political actions and motives can be
reduced is that between friend and enemy.”59 Schmitt continues, “the
political enemy need not be morally evil nor aesthetically ugly. . . .
But he is nevertheless, the other, the stranger; and it is sufficient for
his nature that he is, in a special intense way, existentially something

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 empire of liberty

different and alien.”60 The enactment of a form of politics based on

a dichotomy between friend and foe that organizes itself into differ-
ence is required in contexts in which violence is a necessary feature
of political life. Especially intriguing in the Jamaican case was the
ability of the two-party system to construct the difference between
friend and foe in small, localized, geographical spaces. It is critical
to note that these constructions were consistently reinforced by no-
tions of belonging and were enacted through the political drama-
turgy of songs, colors, party conferences, dances, popular music,
and appropriations of the religious symbolism of both Rastafari and
other Afro-Jamaican religious practices. For many who engaged in
Jamaican political wars, their political rationale was primarily based
on the politics of friend and foe. I now wish to illustrate this empiri-
cally by reporting briefly on a series of research findings. I take this
tack because any study of violence requires a specific and concrete
understanding of the ways in which those who have perpetuated vio-
lence and those who have been affected by violence understand it.

The Findings
In a small urban community that we will call Cascade Gardens,
extensive ethnographic work was done with individuals who en-
gaged in warfare and those who supported such warfare. One par-
ticipant called Nigel (not his real name) summed up how violence
and political war were viewed. He said:

The rationale behind it is that if we kill off one set then there won’t
be any votes. . . . Individuals growing up learned that the person who
were [sic] fighting against you and you were fire shot at were our
enemy. So if they saw us anywhere and hear where we stay they will
kill us61 (emphasis mine).

Another person pointed out that the enemy (who lived a few
blocks away) would behave similarly. Thomas (not his real name)
stated that “Anybody who dem catch . . . Have to dead. You naw
mek you enemy live. At that time I shared the same sentiment.”62 In

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

these contexts differences were rearticulated as reasons and ratio-

nales for war. Nobody admitted to fighting for a job, a house, or
any scarce resource or benefit that was normally distributed by the
Jamaican political system through clientage. Instead, people spoke
about party, community, defense of self, and being a warrior. Ac-
cording to one person, “from you hear stone a lick pon you fence
you know say you have fi bleach. A de same youth wah you cook
with and you know and ting. So you go pon the corner.”63 The
construction of difference that was organized around practices of
friend and foe, along with the reinscribing of this difference through
rituals of belonging, meant, in the words of one community resi-
dent, “We now become instead of natural African people, laborities
and pnp.”64
There were, or are, two forms of violence in the Jamaican context.
One was, or is, political violence, which reached its peak in the 1980
general election when over eight hundred persons died in an electoral
contest fought like a civil war. The Jamaican poet Lorna Goodison has
memorialized this event in the poem “Jamaica 1980.” She writes:

For over all this edenism

hangs the smell of necromancy
and each man eats his brother’s flesh
. . . We’ve sacrificed babies
and burnt mothers65

Goodison’s poem captures the ways in which the so-called island

paradise, the place of the sweet smells of plants and secret streams,
becomes a place of death. In this land of death, differences con-
structed within subaltern groups now play out on a field of war.
This is not genocide but death deployed as terror, as a tactic to de-
stabilize the conventional field of electoral politics. I would argue
that, nearly thirty years after this event, the tactics deployed in this
political war repeat themselves in enactments of violence in Jamaica.
I would also argue that the Jamaican political process has not had
a full and open discussion of this traumatic event, and this in part

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 empire of liberty

allows the event and its reverberations to linger on as a loud silence

in the island’s contemporary history.
The second form of violence to which I wish to draw our atten-
tion was, or is, a violence that links itself to the operation of power
in small geographical spaces (lanes, streets, small communities di-
vided into zones). Political violence and what I call intimate vio-
lence, or violence enacted in small spaces and conducted upon known
bodies, are sometimes linked. But they must be understood differ-
ently. I would argue that the practices of political violence engender
the other form of violence. I now turn to a discussion of violence
and its relationship to power and death within the specific condi-
tions of the Jamaican postcolony.

Violence, Death, and the Making of Duppies

Violence, as I have indicated before, is both a difficult and a slip-
pery subject. Its primary enactment in terms of physicality and the
infliction of pain involves assaults on personhood. As a practice
violence is about spectacle. To be effective as order, it must first awe
and then create fear. Even though violence kills or maims, some-
times its logic is not about death per se but about its deployment
in the production of order. Genocidal violence seeks to cleanse and
purify to create an order of purity. Torture aims to exclude and
mark bodies, to further punish the excluded and mark difference.
The violence in the Jamaican postcolony is also about order, but a
specific kind of order. It is an order in which those already excluded
perpetuate violence as representative enactments of their lives,
which are already marginal in a society that marks them as not
worthy. In other words, it is in part an enactment of lives that are
not grievable.
We noted earlier in this lecture that Hannah Arendt suggests that
violence is “ruled by the means-end category.”66 Hopefully we have
demonstrated that this framework for thinking about violence is
inadequate. If, for a moment, we agree with Foucault about power
and see it as capacity, as the designation of a relationship, rooted in

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

a network of the social,67 then violence is not a means-end instru-

ment but one aspect of power. In other words, violence is not just
a technology of power or a premodern instrument that is negated
through the creation of a disciplinary, liberal society. How does vio-
lence in Jamaican society illustrate this, and what is violence’s rela-
tionship to death in Jamaican society? At this point in the lecture,
we must confront the issue of sovereignty.
Achille Mbembe has suggested that the expression of “sover-
eignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and the capacity to
dictate who may live and who must die.”68 Here of course Mbembe
is pointing us to one of the chief features of sovereignty—its final-
ity. In much of political philosophy, we have become accustomed to
speaking of sovereignty as a form of rule, a power that is the final
arbitral agent, independent of external influences. We should re-
member that the demand for sovereignty was also the great political
call of the anticolonial movement and of subsequent demands for
other forms of decolonialization. I wish, however, to complicate
this conventional understanding of national sovereignty by shift-
ing away from our rightly fierce claims for national and cultural
sovereignties to suggest a meaning in which different forms of self-
fashioning are critical to forms of rule. In other words, I want to
remove sovereignty from the domain of rule constructed around the
making of the nation-state and bring it to the ground of the local.
By moving in this direction, I am suggesting that in those nation-
states where hegemony has been broken we need to understand vio-
lence at the micro level.
As I make this shift, I want to suggest that sovereignty need not
be a large-scale, national operation. In addition, since notions of
belonging are integral to practices of rule, in many circumstances
the enactment of belonging also operates at a micro level. Therefore
I suggest that in many urban Jamaican communities there has been
a shift in the grounds of belonging as the legitimacy of the post-
colonial state has been eroded. One resident of Cascade Gardens
put it well.

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 empire of liberty

There was no money, there was no food, there was no hope. Politi-
cians had failed. They don’t see nobody to look up to, because as far
as it go dem no cater for nobody. . . . everything drop, every man fe
himself, everybody fe dem food. So everybody pon dem own.69

It is within this space that other figures emerge: the area leader and,
eventually, the Shotta Don.
In the early Jamaican postcolony, active subaltern currents oper-
ated in opposition to the hegemony and sovereign power of a native
elite. These forces did not engage in huge rebellions but practiced a
form of cultural guerrilla warfare, seeking to challenge the norms of
citizenship and its values in what the late Rex Nettleford has called
the “battle for space.”70 In this situation the Jamaican Creole nation-
state did not fully establish its hegemony.71 A consequence of this
failure was the state’s inability to establish hegemonic notions of
citizenship to which all classes and social groups could adhere. This
in turn meant that, instead of a narrative of citizenship with its
rituals of belonging practiced through different performances, these
rituals of belonging and solidarity were practiced through commu-
nity linkages inside politically controlled parameters. These prac-
tices were shaped by a social context of deep class and color divi-
sions and by a discourse that emphasized “outside” and “inside,”
with the urban poor continually positioned as “dem de people down
there.” In the present situation, belonging occupies and works
through micro spaces within communities. Within some of these
micro spaces, the area leader and then the Shotta Don rules.

The Shotta Don: A Figure of Death

There are many features of the area leader who then becomes the
Shotta Don, but two are critical for our current discussion.72 The
first is that many area leaders mixed Rastafari symbols with black
nationalism. The typical operational base of the area leader is orga-
nized around an economic venture such as a small shop. At many
of these bases (they are called bases in popular discourse), murals

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

of Marcus Garvey, Bob Marley, and Malcolm X adorn the walls.

Dances are frequently held at these locations. When the dances are
held, persons from neighboring, opposing, and sometimes hostile
political communities are often welcomed. The second feature of
note is that the rule of the area leader functions through a set of
community codes enforced primarily by male individuals. In this
context violence operates in two ways. In the first the enforcement
of the code itself can be violent.73 Second, once “war” breaks out
between communities, warriors take up their guns and engage in
firefights, often to the death. So how does death function in these
operations?
One striking feature of young men who engage in violence is
their conversations with each other, in which they often ask each
other, “how many duppies you mek?”74 If, as Bataille argues, death
is a form of destruction and a sacrifice that is irreversible, as well as
a spectacle that haunts life itself, then for many males involved in
violence death is a spectacle that affirms their lives. This is particu-
larly so because in the middle of war or violence other life-affirming
activities are uncommon. Listen to the voice of another resident of
Cascade Gardens:

Yu have time when every Sunday, every Saturday, you have funeral
inside ya. For years you don’t have a wedding, because it is like a
trend. This week Tom going bury, next week is John, so we making
preparation for that funeral. People just dead, and some of we just
take it like joke, and we dress up and go a de funeral. The funeral is
like a fashion show. And the latest fashion go a funeral when some-
body ask you a who dead, you ask: A who?75

In such communities, young males expect death as an affirma-

tion that they have lived, and the burial ritual is marked not only by
fashion but by gun salutes at the graveside. However, it should be
noted that this is not the general view of the community, even of
those engaged in violence. As one young man called Marcus (not his
real name) puts it, as he became more involved, he had “no feelings

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 empire of liberty

at all” and “had to turn to God to seek answer due to vibes and
tension.” It seems, therefore, that any radical transformation of Ja-
maica has to begin with the recognition that not only has Creole
state hegemony collapsed but a new form of politics has arisen, in
which organized communities operate outside the constitutional and
juridical norms of the nation-state. This is not a situation of dual
power as a prelude to revolution, because the radical subaltern self-
fashioning that extensively drew on Rastafari and a politics of radi-
cal black nationalism has also collapsed. This collapse within sub-
altern geographical spaces means that the area leader is rapidly
losing his dominance and is being replaced by the Shotta Don.

From Rude Bwoy to Shotta Don

In a song titled “Petty Thief,” which is also a remarkable com-
mentary on urban Jamaican life, the dance hall dj Bounti Killa
observes that the petty thief is a predatory figure within the urban
community and not a Rude Bwoy. The song notes the complete
transformation of a postcolonial rebel figure (the Rude Bwoy) into
a commanding figure of vengeance (the Shotta Don). This figure of
vengeance both seeks to destroy and searches for ways to enter the
mainstream of society. Two episodes were central to the formation
of this figure of the Shotta Don, and ironically they both had to do
with the failure of peace processes among urban subaltern groups.
One of these peace processes was attempted in the 1970s, and the
other in 1999.
In the aftermath of what is now called the Green Bay massacre
of 1978, political enforcers from both political parties organized a
peace treaty. The ambush killing of political enforcers by the Jamai-
can military shook many enforcers’ political ties. The two major
figures in the peace effort were Claude Massop from Tivoli Gar-
dens, the main Jamaica Labour Party (jlp) stronghold at the west-
ern end of Kingston, and Aston “Buckie” Thompson from the Peo-
ple’s National Party (pnp). The peace treaty was warmly welcomed
by many of the political enforcers and had the backing of promi-

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

nent individuals, in particular Bob Marley. The peace process was

organized and managed by a council that met regularly at the Am-
bassador Theatre in West Kingston. Its advocates demanded a pro-
gram of public works for the unemployed male youths of urban
Kingston. In an outspoken speech at one of the rallies held in sup-
port of the treaty, Buckie Thompson declared: “After peace now, we
want to see improvement in living conditions. We want work in
general and government must put more in youth programs.” Echo-
ing this call, another individual stated, “Unity wonderful but we
want better housing, better living standard for all people whether
jlp or pnp. We cannot allow politicians to come into West Kings-
ton and divide the youths anymore. The situation must remedy.”76
Individuals close to the process have pointed out that many of the
discussions at the Ambassador Theatre centered on the possibility
of a new political party of Rastafari to be funded with Marley’s
money. This peace process did not last and was buried with the kill-
ing of Massop in Jamaica and Thompson in New York.
Some individuals who attended the various peace council meet-
ings recalled in interviews with me both the promise of the treaty
and its example. Twenty-one years later, in 1999, some of these fig-
ures made a second attempt. However, if the first peace treaty was
driven by a desire for unity in the face of certain death at the hands
of state forces, the second one was driven by two elements: the eco-
nomic activities of individuals who had used their positions as po-
litical enforcers to garner state resources and a growing feeling in
many urban communities that violence had taken its toll.
The second peace process was not as centralized as the first. There
was no central advisory council, although various attempts were
made to pull the leadership of communities together into a com-
bined peace movement. However, it was clear that in the twenty-
one years since the collapse of the first peace movement, many urban
communities had become balkanized. Wherever peace was declared
because of the exhaustion of a community, criminal activity declined.
These activities included rape and petty theft.77 In community spaces

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 empire of liberty

where peace was enacted, forums of community justice emerged.

These forums were sometimes organized to include individuals
within the communities who were seen as elders or who enjoyed
some amount of respect. Elements of black nationalist ideas and
Rastafari were again used to undergird declarations of unity and
peace.
In one community, the peace process encouraged classes in radi-
cal black history and the development of a literacy program. How-
ever, in all the communities peace was unstable. Peter Tosh had
declared at the peace concert in 1978 that there would be no peace
without justice. The second effort at peace collapsed for two rea-
sons. The first was the inability of the peacemakers to provide eco-
nomic development in communities. The second was the emergence
of a generation of young males called Shottas, who did not buy into
either of the two main ideologies of radical subaltern Afro-Jamaica,
Rastafari or radical black nationalism. These Shottas challenged
many area leaders, became leaders themselves, and engaged in pred-
atory activities. The emergence of this avenging figure is the main
sign of the crisis. The figure of the Shotta Don does not seek to ex-
plain and understand his social location by reference to any logic of
black suffering. For this figure, the Jamaican postcolony is itself a
predatory state, and the ways of contesting it that are rooted in sub-
altern rebellious cultures have all failed. There is only one way out,
to obtain enough capital through extortion, government contracts,
and haulage business to influence the formal, two-party system.
The Shotta Don as an avenging figure establishes rule in com-
munities by the force of death. In such circumstances, death is not
a rupture but a norm to be deployed. Violence becomes the fore-
closure of possibilities and is arbitrary. In those contexts, local rule
is about the absolute power of death. Also, violence must now be
brutal in a special sense, and, significantly, rape becomes a regular
feature of violent attacks.
What are we to make of this figure of the Shotta Don and his
reconfiguration of violence and power? There are many similarities

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 Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

in the ways in which death and pain are deployed in all three cir-
cumstances that I have described. But there are vast differences with
regard to violence as purification. If genocide enacts a death-drive
of purification and torture enacts violence as punishment then, for
the Jamaican, Shotta Don violence creates fear primarily in order to
rule. In all of these cases, violence either becomes power or is en-
acted as power. In each case, the human is negated. In a recent
essay, Judith Butler asks about the establishment of the familiar “as
the criterion by which a human life is grievable.”78 It seems to me
that, both inside the empire of liberty and in some sites of the post-
colonial world, we are faced with this question of the human. This
is not the question, who are we? Instead the question is, what are
we? Or to put this another way, what makes us human? The ques-
tion is forcefully brought home to us by the various enactments of
violence as power. In such a context death becomes, not a bound-
ary, as Aristotle once said, but the very horizon of life. And security,
not freedom, shapes how we live. Is this what we want?

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[4]
the end of history or
the invention of existence

Critical Thought and Thinking

about the Human

The real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. —fr antz fanon

One cannot “unsettle” the coloniality of power without a redescription of the human
outside of the terms of our own present descriptive statement of the human.
— s y lv ia w y n t e r

Crim, you can take it from me. If I ever give you freedom, Crim, then all your future is
mine, ’cause whatever you do in freedom name is what I make happen.
—ge o r ge l a m m in g

i begin this final lecture by expressing my deep appreciation to

all of you who have attended this lecture series. Your engaging
comments and questions have been important, making it more like
a conversation than a formal lecture series. You may recall that I
began this lecture series, or conversation, by stating that I was try-
ing to do three things. First, I was not working through any theory
of power but rather was attempting to think about our current mo-
ment. Reformulating the meaning of the phrase empire of liberty, I
posited a possible language in which we might think about the rela-
tionship between power, domination, and the questions of freedom
and desire today. Second, I suggested that the current description of
our present condition, particularly in regard to America, as a “state
of exception” generated by the policies of the Bush Administration,
 The End of History

is ahistorical. Third, I was making an attempt to shift some of the

categories we commonly deploy. With reference to the ahistorical
character of the “state of exception” and American power, I sug-
gested the following: if we use “state of exception” to describe the
current moment of domestic American power, we miss the historical
“sites of exception,” racial slavery and dependent Native American
nations, which have always been constituted by American power.
As a consequence, I have argued that within the United States the
systems of racial slavery and the conquest of the indigenous popula-
tion meant that laws in these communities were never about rights
but were always about death, torture, and pain. This is not an origi-
nal point, and it emerges from my understanding of the labors of
the radical black intellectual tradition and its various writers and
thinkers, particularly W. E. B. DuBois.
But I also find it interesting that Walter Benjamin, in his “Theses
on the Philosophy of History,” makes a similar point when discuss-
ing the idea of “states of emergency.” In his discussion, Benjamin
makes the compelling case that “the tradition of the oppressed
teaches us that the ‘state of emergency’ in which we live is not the
exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history
that is in keeping with this insight.”1 This is an important point
to which I will return. I will suggest that one of the major problems
of critical thought today is that it does not focus on the traditions of
the oppressed as they relate to thought.
In my second lecture, I posited the idea that, when thinking about
questions of race and democracy, it may be useful to rethink the idea
that democracy is an incomplete project to be completed by a series
of prefixes, whether radical, direct, or participatory. Rather, we
should see democracy as an empty signifier and a horizon always
described by its lack. I argued that democracy was formulated in
Western thought in response to a series of questions about the con-
struction of political rule and, to paraphrase Maurice Godelier, was
born out of the basic political relations in Greece between “citizens

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 empire of liberty

and noncitizens, free men and slaves.” In such a context, democ-

racy could be theorized, but the conflict between freemen and slaves
was invisible and thus not theorized.
Of course, while Solon’s reforms led to the abolition of debt
bondage, they did not abolish slavery. After the reforms, slaves in
Greek society were imported and as foreigners were called barbar-
ians. These slaves were outside the polity, while democracy was
within the polis, so that one dimension of Greek freedom was the
freedom to enslave the barbarian. That freedom belonged to the
freeborn Greek male, whether he was an aristocrat or commoner.
Greek freedom allowed the enslavement of another. It was a free-
dom predicated upon enslavement. It was the kind of freedom that
was practiced during the period of racial slavery in America. In
Greek society the slave was reduced to the state of an animate tool.
In Aristotle’s words, the slave was “a part of the master in the sense
of being but a separate part of his body.”2 In such a context, the
slave was human chattel, listed as the “first and most indispensable
kind of property.”3 Following the arguments of the Caribbean his-
torian Elsa Goveia, I made the point that racial slavery was a sys-
tem in which the slave was “property in the person.” From this
perspective, I argued in the second lecture that human groups who
experience racial slavery and colonialism in what I have been call-
ing colonial modernity experience historical and social trauma.
They experience historical trauma in which social wounds cannot
simply be erased by democratic inclusion. Instead, these wounds
produce cries, not laments. These cries force upon us another set of
questions—about living, about what we are, and about the nature
of freedom itself.
I also suggested that when we think of political modernity, we
should rethink what we mean. When making this suggestion I pos-
ited that the encounter between what has been called the Old World
and the New World, which was initiated by the voyages of Colum-
bus beginning in 1492, should be seen as the inaugural event of
modernity, indeed, as the instituting event.4 By this I mean that

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 The End of History

Columbus’s voyages opened a new epoch, changed the relation-

ships between what was thought possible and what was thought
impossible, and broke the bounds of then-accepted temporalities,
ushering in different configurations and framing new questions for
human societies. Acknowledging the Columbian voyages as an in-
stituting event means opening up another set of pathways into the
meanings of political modernity and politics, meanings that are cen-
tral to this lecture series.
My third lecture concerned violence. I engaged with Hannah
Arendt, quarreled with her view that the presence of violence evac-
uates power, and noted that she misses the complex character of
power. Contrary to Arendt, I suggested that violence can be power
and that in its performance as power violence seeks to trap bodies.
As power, violence does not necessarily make death its primary ob-
jective, and sometimes death becomes a means to an end. Violence
as power is about enforcing discipline and an order based upon
frequent enactments of death. Because of violence’s intimate rela-
tionship to pain and death, we tend to see it as existing outside the
boundaries of power. I therefore wish to link violence and power
once again. When discussing violence, I shifted from the registers of
intellectual history and political theory and reported on an ethno-
graphic study that I conducted on violence in Jamaica. The study
focused on an inner city and a group of young men called Shottas.
This study led to my own understanding of the ways in which death
became a performance of a “negative self-fashioning freedom,” a
self-fashioning that operates in the direction of negating life.
It has been critical to review the main elements of my previous
arguments, since they situate this final lecture. From my first lec-
ture, I have been tracking the ways in which power is constructed,
the ways in which we as human beings become subjects. I have also
been arguing that we live at a historical juncture that cannot be
described in the way that Arendt described parts of the twentieth
century, as simply “dark times.” I have been arguing that perhaps
we live in a moment in which power organizes itself as free-dom

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and in doing so both obscures and directs our intellectual energies

so that it is difficult to think in new ways.5 One of the purposes of
these lectures is to suggest possible directions for thinking anew,
and it is to this that I now turn.

Habits of Thinking

Let me begin my reflections on thinking anew by first referring to

our current habits. Our present habits of thinking linger in part be-
cause we have not examined how they were acquired and in part
because we often think in historical analogies rather than histori-
cally. But there is another reason why many of us have not been
able to break our habits of the mind. That reason has to do with
what I call epistemological location. In the field of critical political
theory and thought, a series of events (the American Revolution,
the French Revolution, the Commune in Paris, the formation of the
Soviets in 1905, the Spanish Civil War of 1936, May 1968, and the
Portuguese Revolution of 1974) have become the primary sources
and resources of critique. Some of these events continue to stimu-
late our radical political imagination. This is so much the case that
Alan Badiou speaks of the “unconquerable nostalgia of May 1968”
while proclaiming in 1988, before the collapse of apartheid in South
Africa, that the “Age of Revolution is over.” The aforementioned
events are important, but they are not the only ones that can be de-
ployed as resources for critical thinking. But I am not talking simply
about constructing a broader field of events or correcting epistemic
blind spots through fuller representations. Rather, I am pointing to
a way of thinking, a genealogy of how critical and radical theory
runs along certain tracks already constructed for it.
I will make my point concretely. In a book that attempts to work
through possible meanings of human emancipation for our times,
Alex Callinicos notes that “Eurocentrism is deeply embedded in
historical thought.”6 He then confronts the implications of this state-
ment and calls for a decentering of European history and thought

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 The End of History

as the singular model of human progress. Yet Callinicos is unable to

think deeply about the implications of his own judgment. The ques-
tion before us is not about fuller and more complete representation
of human cultures in the domain of thought, specifically critical
thought. If this were the primary matter at stake, then only the
broadening and diversification of our intellectual resources would
be required. So while I agree that there is both an ethical and intel-
lectual necessity for decentering Western thought, something else is
required. What is that something? It is this. When we decenter,
from what gaze do we decenter? From what angle do we begin to
ask questions?
Some time ago, Walter Benjamin observed that thinking “in-
volves not only the flow of thoughts, but their arrest as well.”7 To
confront the arrest of thought, we need to decenter and to engage
in intellectual pluralism. But we need to ask new questions that
emerge from this process of decentering, questions that shift the old
ones that we have become acquainted with. To get to these ques-
tions, we may have to reorder the categories of thought in which we
do social and critical theory. The operation that DuBois success-
fully achieved in Black Reconstruction makes that text relevant
today. My argument about habits of thinking concerns how the
categories of thought that frame our thinking have become so fixed
that even when we decenter we examine with the same eyes. Thus
we are not able to see the different questions raised either about
freedom or political life, questions that reside, in the words of Syl-
via Wynter, between the “interstices of history.”8 For the remainder
of this lecture, I will attempt to operate from within those inter-
stices as I see them, while thinking about critical thought. In the end
I will point to one possible ground from which we may begin to
elaborate a radical politics. In the development of my arguments for
this lecture, two figures are important as sources. The first is Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and the second is Frantz Fanon.

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 empire of liberty

Hegel and the End of History

I begin with Hegel and the end of history. I do not wish to rehabilitate
Hegel (he does not need my assistance for this to happen), but I find
it intriguing that in the last decade or so, one of his central ideas has
come to frame some currents of hegemonic Western thought. So in
terms of some of the issues facing critical thought, we can produc-
tively begin by thinking about the end of history.
In his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel notes
that “every state is an end in itself, its internal development and
evolution follow a necessary progression whereby the rational, i.e.
justice and the consolidation of freedom gradually emerges.”9 For
Hegel, “freedom is the one authentic property of the spirit,” which is
self-consciousness. Thus, when he writes that the work of the spirit
is “to produce itself, to make itself its own object, and to gain knowl-
edge of itself in this way to exist for itself,” we know that Hegel is
thinking about man existing in a search for his essence. For Hegel,
such a search is both teleological and theological. In Hegel’s view
the spirit is a product of itself, and it strives to fulfill its capacity and
its desire. Once this striving has been achieved, “the end in the histori-
cal process is the freedom of the subject . . . and the end of the world
spirit is realized through the freedom of each individual.” This is his
teleological point. To make his theological point, since “God is omni-
present, he is present in everyone and appears in everyone’s conscious-
ness; and this is the world spirit,”10 the spirit becomes God’s wish.
Hopefully we do not need to be reminded that for Hegel the history of
the world moves from East to West; in his view, Africa has no history.
And it is interesting that the notion of the “end of history” emerges with
the apparent triumph of Western liberalism at the end of the Cold War.
But before we proceed further, I draw your attention to one as-
pect of Nietzsche’s reading of Hegel. In his Untimely Meditations,
Nietzsche is critical of the drive for completeness in German phi-
losophy and of the ways in which this drive works by revealing it-
self to itself. Of course, this is not peculiar to Hegel but pertains to

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 The End of History

a significant segment of Western thought, in spite of more recent

attempts by a set of thinkers to critique totality in what we may call
the post-structuralist moment. However, I am presently interested
in how this drive in Western thought becomes part of the practices
of contemporary power at the level of discourse, and in how, in
doing this, it ties itself into a hard, tripartite knot of freedom, man,
and God.
Obviously therefore, when I speak of the end of history, I am not
referring to Francis Fukuyama’s 1993 book The End Of History
and the Last Man. Rather, I am pointing to the close fit in some
strains of dominant contemporary Western thought between ques-
tions about the essence of man, history, and God. Let me recall for
you President George W. Bush’s third State of the Union address:
“We go forward with confidence, because this call of history has
come to the right country, the liberty we prize is not America’s gift
to the world, it is God’s gift to humanity. . . . we do not claim to
know all the ways of Providence, yet we can trust in them, placing
our confidence in the loving God behind all of life, and all of his-
tory.”11 Some would argue that what we have in this statement is
a return to the religious or the theological in dominant and hege-
monic thought. But let me ask, when has Western thought been fully
free of the theo-political? When have we ever lived in a fully post-
religious world? And, by juxtaposition, do we live in a post-secular
world? By post-secular I do not necessarily mean an increase in the
meaningfulness of religion but rather a changed attitude toward the
modern state’s own secularist self-understanding. One current, dom-
inant strain of thought holds that free-dom becomes the telos, be-
comes the matrix for the end of human history, and that within
such a framework history becomes the working out of a fateful
destiny. This is not the telos of a striving toward human perfectibil-
ity but rather one of arrival at a destination that unfolds through
strife and in which the arrival now signals closure. Jacques Derrida
once noted that striving toward perfectibility can be a source of per-
version. It seems to me that perversion also happens when there is

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 empire of liberty

closure, when the striving becomes absolute, when freedom becomes

closed, not open.
How does the idea of the end of history relate to the current
conjuncture of globalization, our current modernity, and what I call
the empire of liberty? At the level of political economy, we know
that globalization creates concentrations of wealth alongside vast
exclusion and misery. Within this logic of unequal structures, glo-
balization is urbi et orbi, everywhere and anywhere operating as a
kind of hyperbolic accumulation that strives not just to homogenize
the globe but to be a totality. When discussing globalization, Jean-
Luc Nancy observes that “the West has come to encompass the
world.”12 Nancy also remarks that when this happens, the West dis-
appears. I would disagree. In his essay “The West and the Rest:
Discourse and Power,” Stuart Hall notes that the West is an idea, a
concept that conjures verbal and visual languages, models of com-
parison, and criteria of evaluation.13 So within the framework of
globalization, the West does not disappear but consolidates its power.
Jean-Luc Nancy states that, as a civilization, the West represented
the universal and reason. He then notes that up until now “one
cannot say that any other configuration of the world or any other
philosophy of the universal and of reason have challenged that
course.”14 I do not wish to critique this statement other than to
observe that this is an extreme case of epistemological location. Is it
not possible that the critical thought of the West is exhausted? In
other words, might there exist another possible meaning for the end
of history, not the fulfillment of reason, nor that of freedom and self-
consciousness, but rather the “end of the history” for the univer-
salism of the West as the only generative concept and language for
the project of human emancipation? Please note that I am not speak-
ing here of the end of meta-narratives, nor the flexible network of
language games that, in Lyotard’s view, requires “agonistics as a
founding principle” in a so-called postmodern period. Rather, I am
speaking about categories of thought embedded within language,
categories that blind us so that we cannot see new questions.

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 The End of History

In 1951 Hannah Arendt observed that, since the nineteenth cen-

tury, Western political thought had remained “impenetrably silent
and insular in confronting specifically modern questions.”15 I take
this one step further to suggest that when colonialism, empire, and
racial slavery, as instituting events of modernity, are excluded from
the conceptual frameworks of political and critical thought, then
that thought becomes what the late Clifford Geertz called “local
knowledge.”16

Ethics and Critical Thought

One current attempt to grapple with this problem in critical politi-

cal and social thought and criticism is a turn to ethics. In this ethical
turn Emmanuel Levinas is an important figure. And rightly so, since
his elaboration of the ethics of the other in part flows from his grap-
pling with the character of Nazism as a totality and as a system of
domination through death and pain. Part of Levinas’s critique stems
from his understanding that freedom and, as a consequence, human
creativity were made impossible by Fascism. Of course, critiques
of Fascism remain a touchstone and have generated much critical
thought in Western political theory.17 The point here is that his-
torically catastrophic events generate their own questions. So if a
particular set of questions emerged from one set of catastrophic
events, what questions emerge from others? Here I am pointing to
the relationships of catastrophic events to each other and the traces
they leave in our contemporary world. So I am not arguing for a
narrow conception of thought of this or that intellectual tradition,
nor am I suggesting that traditions operate in isolated silos. Rather,
I am positing that the questions posed to us by the inauguration of
colonial modernity work to shape our contemporary questions and
that we continue to ignore them or do not recognize their centrality.
Let me take one example.
At the level of polity, the questions that emerged with Thomas
Hobbes in the seventeenth century concerned rule and sovereign

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power. Hobbes himself notes that he developed his ideas when Eng-
land was “burning with the questions of the rights of rulers and the
duties of subjects, forerunners of an approaching war.”18 In this
context he writes, “I authorize and give up my right of governing
myself, to this man or assembly of men on the condition, that thou
give up thy right to him and authorize all his actions in like man-
ner.”19 From this perspective Hobbes constructs a sovereign power
and, in a moment of metaphorical thinking, compares sovereign
power to the case of a child’s submission to a father. It is crucial to
note that, when Hobbes discusses laying aside rights, he says it is
done either by renunciation or by transfer. In other words, the indi-
vidual willingly gives up his or her rights for a common purpose.
This was not the situation with colonial conquest. By the seventeenth
century, when European colonial empires already held sway, an-
other series of questions was being posed about rule, subjects, and
rights. These questions were of a different character than the ones
Hobbes formulated and attempted to answer. One episode that il-
luminates these different questions was the debate between Barto-
lomé de Las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda in 1550. The nub
of the debate was the question posed by Sepúlveda: on what basis
could the rights of the conquered native populations in the New
World be abrogated? The debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda
concerned the basis for the denial of rights, not sovereign rule. The
political logics of these two questions move in two different direc-
tions. Thus one question that faces us in critical thought is broached
by the debate between Las Casas and Sepúlveda: how does the ab-
rogation of rights relate to and shape the conception of rights itself?
It is clear that when we ask this question, we are on different grounds
of political thought and philosophy. In other words, the issues raised
by colonial power about conquest, possession, and the intellectual
basis for creating systems of servitude over groups of people are
political logics that complicate not only rule and rights but also our
responses to them. I am arguing that the discourses and practices
that opposed various abrogations offer us insights that we may add

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to our repertoire of critical thought. Let me give you one final ex-
ample of what I mean. The eighteenth-century English historian and
planter Bryan Edwards, a figure sympathetic to colonial power, ob-
serves that for colonial government, “the leading principle on which
the government is supported is fear; or a sense of that absolute coer-
cive necessity which leaving no choice of action, supercedes all ques-
tions of rights”20 (emphasis mine). The political logics of these sets
of practices unfold another set of debates in a different direction.

Rights and Abrogation

At the core of the abrogation of rights, coercion, and wars of con-

quest was the central question of who and what is a human being.
For Western thought this question of the human has been answered
in different ways, ranging from man’s relationship to the divine, to
Cartesian anxieties about the body, to Martin Heidegger’s notion of
a being that is created out of a void but that is nevertheless con-
nected. However, within the domain of conventional scholarship,
we have not spent much time thinking about this question of who
and what is a human being from the perspective of human beings
who were considered to be non–human beings. This means that our
answers about the human typically have a framing, normative per-
spective that draws from dominant discourse. This allows many of
these answers to operate within a philosophical anthropos of white
or European normativeness. Paul Ricoeur tells us that history is a
flux of events and that within that flux the advent of “man” was
mediated.21 Let me twist Ricoeur a bit: the flux of the event (colo-
nial modernity) inaugurated both man and knowledge of man. This
knowledge leaves deposits and traces that we have to wrestle with.
Today we need to recognize the limits of these deposits and traces.
So let me return to the end of history, and suggest that there needs to
be another end of history.
It is a conceptual end of history. It is an end of history for reason,
not as meta- narrative but as particular categories of thought about

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the human that presently reside in dominant philosophical anthro-

pology.22 Perhaps we are at a moment in the history of critical
thought in which the labor of the negative is to create anew. For
help in this labor, I turn to my second figure, Frantz Fanon.

Fanon and the New

Why Fanon? At the end of John Edgar Wideman’s recent novel

Fanon, the author creates an imaginary political meeting attended
by Fanon. Before Fanon speaks to the meeting, Wideman uses the
narrator’s voice to meditate on maps. Invoking a certain mapping
of the world, a mapping that erases others, Wideman as narrator
writes, “Fanon understands it, the map that erases him by erasing
itself by erasing him, can be flipped over to its unwritten side and
then perhaps you could begin a fresh drawing of the world.”23 I
think about critical thought from within the interstices of history by
working through Fanon because he is, I believe, a twentieth-century
figure who has posed some questions about our contemporary world.
A little over a decade ago, Stuart Hall raised a similar question:
“Why Fanon?”24 Making the point that every rereading is ultimately
political, Hall suggests that part of the attraction of Black Skin,
White Masks is its multivocality. He also argues that Fanon miscon-
strued Lacan, Freud, and Hegel and that these acts of misconstrual
produced remarkable insights. On the other hand, Lewis Gordon
in his 1995 text Fanon and the Crisis of European Man argued that
Fanon continues to be relevant in broad terms. Gordon notes,
“Fanon embodies a crisis in the very effort to study and forge a bet-
ter world for human beings. The crisis itself has been articulated as
a form of bad faith in which the ability to construct a tomorrow is
concealed.”25 Both of these positions were part of a debate at the
time about Fanon. So what is the politics by which I am offering a
rereading of segments of Black Skin, White Masks? My preoccupa-
tion has been with representation and subjectivity and how they are
profoundly shaped by power’s drive for total domination. I would

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argue that the theorist and activist Fanon was supremely concerned
with these matters.
By working with Fanon in this way I am neither rehabilitating
him as a Caribbean thinker, nor even as a postcolonial figure neces-
sary to the field of postcolonial studies. Instead I want to work with
and through some of the questions he posed, because from his loca-
tion as a colonialized, racialized subject he formulated a series of
basic questions that continue to resonate in our present. My argu-
ment is not about whether we are beyond Fanon or not, rather it is
about thinking through the questions he posed, not the answers he
gave. I issue a caveat here. These questions are not perpetual ones
existing for all time, but they were posed so sharply in a context of
profound global changes at the time that perhaps we have yet to
face their enormous implications. At another level, I wish to think
with and through Fanon in this lecture because he confronts Hegel
and overturns the idea of the other as a permanent fixture of human
ways of living. In doing this, I am following the lead of Charles
Long, who with reference to Hegel’s master–slave dialectic notes
that the “hardness of life was not the oppressor; the oppressor was
the occasion, for the experience but not the datum of the experience
itself.”26
As I think through Fanon, I offer a rereading of the last two
chapters of Black Skin, White Masks and the last chapter of The
Wretched of the Earth. But before we examine these texts, let me
say something about Fanon’s writing.
For Fanon, writing was about engagement and a form of criti-
cism in which language could be used to shape new categories. Cat-
egories are never stable for Fanon; he forms them, deploys them,
and then releases them, thereby creating a style of writing in which
his own restlessness becomes the operating principle. In Fanon’s
writing there is improvisation as he confronts reality, shakes it, and
then recasts the categories in which we think about a set of specific
issues. In Fanon’s thought, colonialism and racism are systems of
power and linguistic events with different levels of insertion into the

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world. Consequently his writing is constructed through different reg-

isters of the speech-act in which temporalities are often juxtaposed.
In perhaps one of the finest readings of Fanon, Ato Sekyi-Otu
observes that “Fanon’s discourse was dramaturgical in form.”27 He
then adds that Fanon writes in a language of “political experience.”
Fanon’s texts themselves are political acts; they form a narrative of
the political while participating in and defining the political. I have
spent a moment reflecting on Fanon’s writing because it is within
the act of writing, which is similar to the act of making, that we
begin to see another aspect of Fanon’s radical political praxis.
The last two chapters of Black Skin, White Masks are devoted
to two issues, “The Negro and Recognition,” and a conclusion
that invokes Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bona-
parte. Within the chapter “The Negro and Recognition,” I want to
focus on the segment titled “The Negro and Hegel.” Fanon tells us
that he turns to Hegel because the “Black man is a former slave,”
and he wishes to confront this history of slavery and its meanings
for the present by juxtaposing one of the core models of the West-
ern master-slave dialectic with racial slavery. For Fanon, Hegel’s
master-slave dialectic is one in which the drive of the dialectic is an
“absolute reciprocity which must be emphasized.” He cites Hegel’s
Phenomenology of the Mind and notes that for Hegel both the slave
and the master had to recognize “themselves as mutually recog-
nizing each other.”28 In Fanon’s reading of Hegel, in order to be
oneself, to be human, “the concept of recognition is essential.”29
For the Hegelian master-slave dialectic to operate, both slave and
master must desire reciprocal recognition. However, in Fanon’s
thinking this master-slave dialectic is untenable with regard to ra-
cial slavery. As he notes in a remarkable footnote that rips the
master-slave dialectic asunder, “I hope I have shown that here the
master differs basically from the master described by Hegel. For
Hegel there is reciprocity; here the master laughs at the conscious-
ness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition
but work.”30

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But what does the slave want? Here I would argue that Fanon is
ambiguous and that he gets the historical record of slave revolts in
the Caribbean wrong due to his narrow focus on French-speaking
islands, which excludes Haiti. Fanon is very specific in addressing
French abolitionism. He is not referring to abolitionism in general
when he notes, “the black man contented himself with thanking the
white man, and the most forceful proof of the fact is the impressive
number of statues erected all over France and the colonies to show
the white France stroking the kinky hair of this nice Negro whose
chains had just been broken.”31 Fanon has French abolitionism in
mind when he says, “The White man, in the capacity of master, said
to the Negro, ‘From now on you are free.’”32 He continues, “But the
Negro knows nothing of the cost of freedom for he has not fought
for it. From time to time he has fought for liberty and justice, but
these were always white liberty and white justice.”33 For Fanon the
slave desires “to be like the master. . . . in Hegel the slave turns away
from the master and turns toward the object. Here the slave turns
towards the master and abandons the object.”34 This is a strange
reading of slave emancipation by Fanon. He is very accurate to
point to French and, I would argue, British and American abolition-
ism as very much about white liberty and white justice. But this was
not the only strain of abolitionism. There was a black abolitionism
that carried within itself a logic of liberation as the ground of free-
dom. The most important expression of this current of abolitionism
occurred in the dual Haitian Revolution.35 Any examination of this
revolution illustrates that Fanon is accurate about the master’s only
wishing work from the slave but that Fanon is wrong about what
the slave wants. I would argue that the slave turns away from the
object of work but does not turn toward the master. Instead the slave
turns to a series of practices of freedom.36 For the slave, the nature
of slave labor that uses both the slave and labor as chattel means
that one effective practice of freedom is the negation of plantation
labor. Thus the slave in the Atlantic world neither functions, as Al-
exandre Kojeve says, as a part of the master’s “existential impasse,”37

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nor does the slave want to be like the master. The slave primarily
turns his face away from work toward the master in order to re-
move the master as the source of domination. The slave does this to
break the bondage of enslavement and to find a new freedom.
In a path-breaking study of the slave dimension of the Haitian
revolution, Carolyn Fick tells us about an observation by a French
colonial official who was perturbed at the actions of ex-slaves. She
writes that the official became preoccupied and noticed that the ex-
slaves were, in his words, “unambitious and uncompetitive, the
black values his liberty only to the extent that it affords him the
possibility of living according to his own philosophy.”38 The ques-
tion before us, one that we have yet to fully grapple with, is, what
was this philosophy of freedom? In my view, this is the question
that is posed when we not only decenter Western thought but also
change our gaze. But let us return to Black Skin, White Masks.
We are now in a position to pursue further Fanon’s reading of
Hegel’s master-slave dialectic as buttressed by historical events: The
master wants the slave to work and desires recognition only to the
extent that it will make the slave work. The slave wants freedom
and faces the master to destroy the system of slavery. This is a new
dialectic, neither one of recognition nor one of unequal encounter,
but one in which new forms of freedom are being imagined, plot-
ted, and enacted wherever possible.
What does this have to do with critical thought? Everything. I
would argue that this new dialectic can best be seen in the dual Hai-
tian Revolution and the ways in which practices of freedom played
themselves out during the process of that revolution.39 I want there-
fore to suggest that in the end one vital resource for us in the devel-
opment of critical thought is the character of the slave’s freedom,
which emerged in distinct opposition to the liberties of those who
ruled the Atlantic world in the eighteenth century. Space does not
allow a full elaboration of this point, but one of the issues raised in
the dual Haitian Revolution was the relationship of wage labor to
freedom.40 This was part of the ex-slave’s own philosophy. The ex-

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 The End of History

slave’s reluctance in becoming a wage laborer means that long be-

fore Marx discerned that wage labor was really “wage slavery,” the
Haitian ex-slave recognized this. Thus issues of freedom arising from
the perspective of the ex-slave should not be separated into distinct
spheres; they are closely tied into a knot about how to live. The ex-
slaves may not have found the answer to this question, but it is the
posing that we are concerned with.
I am not arguing here that slave freedom is in any way a model
of freedom for our present moment. I also eschew thinking in mod-
els because I think it is a dangerous exercise, reducing the complexi-
ties of human action to narrow slots. What I am suggesting is that
the practices of slave freedom pose the following questions for us
today:

• What is the relationship between freedom and labor or work?

• What is the relationship between equality and freedom? Are these
irrevocably separate ends?
• How do human societies construct ways of life in which human
domination does not factor?

A reader may say that some of these questions have already been
posed in various ways and in different traditions. And my response
would be yes. But the dual Haitian Revolution posed all three si-
multaneously. So while other revolutions of the period marked par-
tial ruptures, the dual Haitian Revolution exploded into new ter-
rain. Such ruptures, though robust, also tend to be fragile, and we
often lose sight of the questions posed by the practices of those who
wish to turn liberation into freedom. Fanon recognizes this.
In the conclusion to Black Skin, White Masks, Fanon invokes
Marx by paying attention to the character of a social revolution.
Marx made the point that the “social revolution . . . cannot draw
its poetry from the past but only from the future, thereby creating
a situation where content exceeds its expression.”41 This is the cen-
tral idea upon which Fanon builds the concluding chapter of Black
Skin, White Masks. Without making any explicit reference to Aimé

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 empire of liberty

Césaire’s classic poem Notebook of a Return to My Native Land

and its assumptions about the burden of history, Fanon critiques
Césaire’s understanding of the function of history in the colonial
context as a nightmare in which the colonized encounters a past
haunted by deep pain. Césaire’s poem rejects this pain and con-
structs in its place a desire that embraces history, but not the history
manufactured by the colonial power. He writes in Notebook:

Eia for those who have never invented anything

For those who have never explored anything
For those who have never subdued anything.42

However, for Fanon the nightmare of colonial history was a

burden that trapped the struggle for freedom. As he forcefully pro-
claims, “Like it or not, the past cannot in no way guide me in the
present moment.”43 Of course Fanon is writing polemically here
because he has in mind a certain view of history that in his view
seeks to represent Africa in terms that mask particular African his-
torical realities. However, there is no doubt that Fanon is ambigu-
ous about history, about its function and relationship to acts of
emancipation, so that oftentimes he gestures and calls upon us to
move beyond the historical. And here I both disagree and agree. If
Fanon means that the past is superseded and dead, then I disagree.
If he means that the past must not be a burden but a release, then
I am in agreement. History in the present is not about burden or
mourning; it is about accounting for the population of the dead.
But this dead population is not dead, because their actions leave
traces that work to configure the world. In this sense our present
historical actions are dialogues between the living and the dead.
This is why the questions of history are always about the present.
To engage in this dialogue we remember wounds, but more impor-
tantly, we hear the cries produced by wounds. Those cries affirm a
different kind of freedom; they point us to a different song of the
future upon which we can draw. But we draw from these future
songs with a sense of history. Of course this is not a “monumental-

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 The End of History

istic conception of the past,” but rather a critical history, what I

have called elsewhere a “dread history.”44 Fanon recognizes this be-
cause he writes, just before he concludes the final chapter of Black
Skin, White Masks:

The self takes its place by opposing itself; Yes and No. I said in my
introduction that man is a yes, I will never stop reiterating that. Yes
to life. Yes to Love. Yes to generosity. But man is also a no. No to
the scorn of man. No to the degradation of man. No to the exploi-
tation of man. No to the butchery of what is most human in man:
freedom.45

Fanon’s affirmations are key to my arguments here because he

uses them to establish a possible trajectory for critical thought and
praxis. So in the last four pages of his text, he returns to history
and writes, “I am not a prisoner of history. I should not seek there
the meaning of my destiny. I should constantly remind myself that
the real leap consists in introducing invention into existence. In the
world through which I travel, I am endlessly creating myself.”46
These are remarkable sentences. What do they mean, and how can
we think with them?
First there is the drama of life itself: it is about endlessly creating
oneself. This drama suggests that one element of freedom might
include establishing the conditions under which creation is possible.
So if freedom is about creation (not self-realization), Fanon does
not separate the conditions for and the exercise of freedom. Second,
although ambiguous about history, Fanon wants us to consider that
living is not simply about existence. For Fanon it is not enough to
say that existence is ontologically prior to essence because of the
facticity of being in the world. To be is to live and to live is to in-
vent, to create with others. So the capacity to create is the active
part of being. The conditions for this creativity simultaneously con-
struct grounds for the leap of invention and create the grounds of
and for the practice of freedom itself. These practices allow us to go
beyond being. Fanon writes, “I am a part of Being to the degree that

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 empire of liberty

I go beyond it.”47 In going beyond being, Fanon states that we ne-

gate the hierarchies human societies have constructed and instead
make attempts “to touch each other, to feel each other, to explain
the other to myself.”48 In Fanon’s call all hierarchies are flattened,
the other is no longer an Other, and a common ground of being
human is established by which we may live together and construct
humane ways of life. Fanon then ends with a sentence that with one
stroke reworks liberal theory. With a force rarely seen in political
literature, he asks, “Was my freedom not given to me then in order
to build the world of the You?”49 There is no more Other or I, as a
common humanity in all its pluralism and difference becomes the
foundation for critical thought and radical political praxis.
Fanon then outlines a perspective that we in our old penchant
for labels would call “radical humanism.”50 So for the sake of this
lecture let us call it that. This is a humanism in which the critical
element of being human is the degree to which one is part of being
and yet is able to go beyond it to build the world of the You. This
is not a humanism in which the human, though central, is conceived
of as a “whole series of subjected sovereignties [and] a theory of the
subject,” as Michel Foucault tells us.51 In Western thought human-
ism is very much a discourse about the human and the possibilities
of mastery of self. In Marxist theory, humanism is about ending
estranged labor that alienates the worker from the human self.52
Fanon and other radical anticolonial thinkers do not present either
of these conceptions of humanism. Rather, their affirmation of the
human rejects conventional humanist discourse to develop a radical
politics of the human in which human beings are neither ends nor
means. To be human is to live, to engage in a set of practices of in-
ventions that creates freedom. In such a form of life, reason is also
deeply connected to the body as the force that enacts these practices
and is their embodiment. No wonder Fanon ends the chapter and
the book with the cry: “My final prayer: O my body, make of me
always a man who questions.”53

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 The End of History

In Fanon’s thought Europe’s colonial project disqualifies it from

leading a new radical enterprise. Thus he issues his call in the final
sentences of The Wretched of the Earth in which he proclaims, “For
Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn
over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try and set
afoot a new man.”54 The issues now emerge: Where are these con-
cepts to come from? How may we think about them and their re-
lationship to critical thought and critical theory?
In general, critical theory can loosely be described as “a whole
range of theories which take a critical view of society and the human
sciences or which seek to explain the emergence of their objects of
knowledge.”55 Of course the work of the Frankfurt School has been
central to this tradition.56 I want to argue that an overarching pur-
pose of both critical thought and critical theory has been to critique
the workings of power, to mark the shifts of power and its new
configurations, and to make clear its dominant apparatuses and ca-
pacities. This intellectual labor continues to be a necessary feature
of critical thought, and to some degree these lectures have operated
in this tradition. However, if we think about other possible mean-
ings of Walter Benjamin’s phrase “the traditions of the oppressed,”
we notice another productive element to critical thought that is often
not paid attention to: the opening up of another archive in which
power is contested. This is not about writing a new history of re-
sistance, or even of revolution, but about developing a capacity to
gaze on practices through which we may grasp how different acts
of humanization occur.
I hope that by now you are beginning to see the outline of what
I am working through. I am traversing a different terrain, not one
that gets caught up with forms of democracy or theories of social
change (important as these are), but rather a terrain that asks us to
think about what we are, what we have become, and how we might
rupture the frames of our present selves. How do we create a rup-
ture in which the profound questions opened up by colonial and

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 empire of liberty

racial power are both posed and, if possible, answered? How do we

live together in difference? How do we construct ways of life that
create a human world of a You, not of an other?
These questions appear before us in sharp focus because the em-
pire of liberty seeks an end of history in which different possibilities
of the human are closed off. The issues I have raised open a critical
intellectual space both to imagine new possibilities and to gain a
historical sense of various forms of life. In other words, I suggest
that critical thought can become productive by focusing not just
on power but on ways and forms of life. By this I mean practices in
which thinking is both thought and doing. This is a form of activity
that may move us beyond a consideration of being as only ontology
and into a space where existence is about ways of life. I submit that
power today understands this. In Arendt’s words, power under-
stands that politics is not only about the “co-existence and associa-
tion of different men,” but is about the ways of life constructed in
this association. Politics is about ways of life constituting life forms,
what the Jamaican Rastafari calls livity.
The current objective of power is to construct a “politics of
being,” to preserve life as it is, to stop action and foreclose possi-
bility, since the human world is our own artifice. To reinvent action
requires us to move beyond this “politics of being” to a politics of
the radical imagination. Such a politics functions in two ways.
First, it deciphers the codes of power, and second, it allows us to
think outside the death-drive of power. It allows us to construct
freedom not as an absolute but as an ever-changing contingency of
our fragile imperfectibility. I wish to end this lecture with a series
of statements:
• We live today at a peculiar moment in human history in which
free-dom has become the sign of human domination.
• We live today at a moment when violence and torture are
performed in various places with a kind of banality, while the
dialogue we engage in concerns degrees of pain and what
constitutes punishment and torture.

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 The End of History

• We live in a world in which the traces of the colonial modern are

not just haunting shadows but are part of the everyday technologies
of rule that are deployed.
• We live in a world in which the traces of racial domination
continue to shape our human world.
• We live in a world in which we have yet to face the most complex
questions posed by the event of the colonial encounter: How shall
we live together in difference? What does freedom look like when
we bring “invention into existence”?

I offer no immediate answers to these questions, not because

there are none, but because answers for life and living can only be
found in the practices of life itself and in our theorization of those
practices. I hope that in this lecture series I have been able to open
a conversation, to pose a few questions, and in the end to ask all of
us to heed the cries of wounds that have emerged from various his-
torical events, so that perhaps in our fragile lives we may construct
freedom. A freedom in which we constitute our humanness.

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notes

Introduction

1. Stuart Hall, “The Toad in the Garden: Thatcherism among the Theorists,”
in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, ed. Cary Nelson and Lawrence
Grossberg (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), p. 49.
2. C. L. R. James, The Future in the Present (London: Allison and Busby,
1977), pp. 202–3.
3. These essays have been published in Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics,
Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003).
4. E-mail exchange with Ronald Judy, August 2009.
5. Of course I here refer to the way in which Michel Foucault uses the term
to describe the emergence of a new form of power which seeks to capture
“man-as-species.” Later on I will expand this conception and argue that the
current drive of power is about capturing human desires and imagination. For
Foucault’s discussion of the bio-political, see Michel Foucault, “Society Must
Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Ber-
tani and Alessandro Fontana, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003),
chapter 11.
6. Cited in Robert W. Tucker and David Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty: The
Statecraft of Thomas Jefferson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 159.
7. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction in America: An Essay Toward a
History of the Part Which Black Folk Played in the Attempt to Reconstruct
Democracy in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1962), p. 3.
8. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), p. 3.

Chapter 1: Empire of Liberty

1. Selected examples of this debate appear in the following: Niall Ferguson,

Colossus: The Price of America’s Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004);
 Notes to pages 9–14

Joseph Nye, Jr., The Paradox of American Power (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2002); Andrew J. Bacevich, ed., The Imperial Tense: Prospects and
Problems of American Empire (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2003); Amy Kaplan,
The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 2002); Andrew J. Bacevich, American Empire: The Reali-
ties and Consequences of U.S. Diplomacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2002). We also need to be reminded that there has always been an
anti-imperialist tradition in American life. For books and discussions about
some elements of this tradition, see the Web site: www.americanempireproject
.com.
2. For a sense of the issues involved in this side of the debate, see the essays
in Daedalus, Spring 2005.
3. The most important argument along these lines is Michael Ignatieff, “The
American Empire: The Burden,” New York Times, May 5, 2003.
4. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2000), p. 9.
5. Ibid.
6. Dominic Lieven, Empire: The Russian Empire and Its Rivals (London:
John Murray, 2000), p. 14.
7. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Ba-
linski (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 3.
8. Ibid.
9. Of course there are the additional questions of the conceptual basis of a
universal human nature and of what constitutes imperial legitimacy. To put the
matter bluntly, on what basis and under what assumptions is the good in the
political realm conceptualized?
10. Cited in Anthony Pagden, Peoples and Empires (New York: Modern
Library, 2001), p. 26.
11. Ibid., p. 29.
12. Thus many supporters of American empire have pointed out America’s
reluctance to engage in what is called nation building. For a discussion of this,
see Ferguson, Colossus.
13. Cited in Robert Aldrich, The Age of Empires (London, Thames and
Hudson, 2002), 302.
14. Cited in Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom (New York: Nor-
ton, 1998), p. 9.
15. Cited in Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, p. 19.
16. Julian Boyd, “Thomas Jefferson’s ‘Empire of Liberty’” Virginia Quar-
terly Review, no. 24 (1948): p. 548.
17. Tucker and Hendrickson, Empire of Liberty, p. 7.

[ 124 ]
 Notes to pages 14–20

18. Cited in Amy Kaplan, “Violent Belonging and the Question of Empire
Today” (Presidential Address to the American Studies Association) American
Quarterly 56, no. 1 (March 2004): p. 5.
19. Cited in Aldrich, Age of Empires, p. 280.
20. Cited in Aldrich, Age of Empires, p. 280.
21. For a discussion of these interventions, see Jenny Pearce, Under the
Eagle: U.S. Intervention in Latin America and the Caribbean (Boston: South
End Press, 1982).
22. William Appleman Williams, Empire as a Way of Life (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1980).
23. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 1998), p. 7.
24. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” p. 242.
25. Ibid., p. 245.
26. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power (New York: New
Press, 2000), p. 332.
27. Ibid., p. 333.
28. Ibid.
29. William Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a
New American Culture (New York: Vintage, 1994), p. 6.
30. Ibid., p. 8.
31. Cited in Leach, Land of Desire, p. 37.
32. Ibid.
33. Achille Mbembe, On Private Indirect Government (Dakar: CODESRIA,
2000), p. 7.
34. Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 57.
35. Alice Conklin, A Mission to Civilize: The Republican Idea of Empire in
France and West Africa, 1895–1930 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1997), p. 1.
36. Ibid., p. 13.
37. It is interesting to read many of the debates over the implementation
of French colonial power, particularly over the project of colonization in Al-
geria. See the 1841 essay in Jennifer Pitts, ed. and trans., Alexis de Tocqueville:
Writings on Empire and Slavery (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press,
2001), pp. 59–116. Tocqueville argued about the relationship of domination
to colonization and in his 1841 essay on Algeria made the point that “domi-
nation . . . is the only means to achieve colonization” (p. 64). For Tocque-
ville, domination was about war, but colonialism was in part about a civilizing
mission.

[ 125 ]
 Notes to pages 21–26

38. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967),
pp. 17–18.
39. For a discussion of this process and the ways in which British colonial
policy executed its civilizing mission in a post-slavery context, see Thomas
Holt, The Problem of Freedom (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Press, 1992).
See also Catherine Hall, Civilizing Subjects (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2002).
40. For a discussion of Mill’s ideas on race and colonialism, see Anthony
Bogues, “John Stuart Mill and ‘The Negro Question’: Race, Colonialism, and
the Ladder of Civilization,” in Andrew Valls, ed., Race and Racism in Modern
Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005), pp. 217–34.
41. Cited in Niall Ferguson, “The unconscious colossus: limits of (& alter-
natives to) American empire” Daedalus 134, no. 2 (Spring 2005): p. 22.
42. Sacvan Bercovitch, The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1978), pp. 93–94.
43. John Gray, Two Faces of Liberalism (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 2.
44. Robert Cooper, “Imperial Liberalism,” The National Interest, no. 79
(Spring 2005): p. 34.
45. Louis Althusser, “Ideology and the Ideological State Apparatuses,” in
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays (New York: Monthly Review Press,
2001), p. 116.
46. Ibid.
47. Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution (Peterborough, Ontario:
Broadview Press, 2001), p. 64.
48. George Bush, “America’s Responsibility, America’s Mission,” in Impe-
rial Tense (see note 8), p. 5.
49. Jacques Lacan, Ecrits: A Selection (New York: Norton, 2004), p. 330.
50. For a discussion of this idea, see Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook
the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable
Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in
Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice,
ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Press,
2006), pp. 107–69.
51. For a discussion of this, see Zygmunt Bauman, Consuming Life (Cam-
bridge: Polity Press, 2007).
52. J. A. Hobson, Imperialism (New York: Gordon Press, 1975), p. 23.
53. See in particular Harry Magdoff, Imperialism without Colonies (New
York: Monthly Review Press, 2003).
54. Of course there are American colonies, and the history of American in-
tervention in Latin America is one in which military and authoritarian dictator-
ships were openly helped and supported.

[ 126 ]
 Notes to pages 27–32

55. Rogers Smith, Civic Ideals (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press,
1997), p. 6.
56. Judith Shklar, “Positive Liberty, Negative Liberty in the United States,”
in Redeeming American Political Thought (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1998), p. 111.
57. Cited in J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in
America, 1492–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 9–10.
58. Ibid., p. 12.
59. See in particular Donald Pease, “9/11: When Was ‘American Studies
After the New Americanists’?” boundary 2 33, no. 3 (Fall 2006): pp. 73–101.
60. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
Press, 2004), p. 590.
61. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2005).
62. One intellectual current that I do not deal with in this lecture is that of
American exceptionalism. There are many texts on this subject. I recommend
two: William Spanos, American Exceptionalism in the Age of Globalization
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 2008), and, more recently, Don-
ald Pease, New American Exceptionalism (Minneapolis: University of Minne-
sota Press, 2009).
63. Elsa Goveia, The West Indian Slave Laws of the 18th Century (Bridge-
town, Barbados: Caribbean Universities Press, 1970), p. 21.
64. Joan Dayan, “Legal Slaves and Civil Bodies,” in Materializing Democ-
racy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed. Russ Castronovo and Dana
Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 55.
65. Cited in A. Leon Higginbotham, Jr., In the Matter of Color: Race and
the American Legal Process (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), p. 163.
66. Ibid., p. 39.
67. Nicolás Guillén, Man-Making Words: Selected Poems of Nicolás Guil-
lén, trans. Roberto Márquez and David McMurray (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 1972), p. 187.
68. For an initial discussion of this subject, see Anthony Bogues, Singing
Songs of Freedom (forthcoming).
69. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” p. 240.
70. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stan-
ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998).
71. Perhaps one way to think of this is to complicate our understanding of
modernity by thinking about it as colonial modernity. In other words, we ought
to grapple with the fact that we cannot think historically about so-called moder-
nity itself without locating it alongside colonial rule and therefore coloniality.
72. Colin Dayan, “Legal Terrors” Representations, no. 92 (Fall 2005): p. 49.

[ 127 ]
 Notes to pages 32–40

73. Colin Dayan, “Cruel and Unusual: The End of the Eighth Amendment”
Boston Review, November 2004, http://www.bostonreview.net/BR 29.5/dayan
.php. My initial argument uses a great deal from Colin Dayan’s current work
on this subject.
74. Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua L. Dratel, eds., The Torture Papers: The
Road to Abu Ghraib (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 53.
75. This is simply untrue. I have profound disagreements with the rubric of
“failed state,” but any cursory glance at the states labeled in this way demon-
strates that many of them have seats in the UN, a sure marker of international
recognition.
76. I have summarized the conditions for a failed state as outlined by the
document. For a full description, see Karen J. Greenberg and Joshua Dratel,
The Torture Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge: Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 2005), pp. 38–125.
77. Cited in Christina Burnett and Burke Marshall, eds., Foreign in a Do-
mestic Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), p. 13.
78. Cited in Kaplan, Anarchy of Empire, p. 10.
79. See Charles Mills, The Racial Contract (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1997).
80. Cited in David Hackett Fischer, Liberty and Freedom: A Visual History
of America’s Founding Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 715.
81. Pierre Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1995), p. 23.
82. Ibid.
83. Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended,” p. 246.
84. Graham Burchell, “Peculiar Interests: Civil Society and Governing ‘The
System of Natural Liberty,’” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmental-
ity, ed. Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 139.
85. Langston Hughes, “Words Like Freedom,” in The Collected Poems of
Langston Hughes, ed. Arnold Rampersad and David Roessel (New York: Vin-
tage, 1995), p. 269.

Chapter 2: Race, Historical Trauma, and Democracy

1. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (New York: Oxford University

Press, 1997), p. 3.
2. Ibid.
3. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1967),
p. 8.

[ 128 ]
 Notes to pages 40–46

4. Dominick LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma (Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 2001), p. 81.
5. When I use the word wrong here, I mean it in some of the senses in which
Jacques Rancière deploys it. See Jacques Rancière, Disagreement: Politics and
Philosophy (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), especially chap-
ter 2. For Rancière, “the wrong is simply the mode of subjectification in which
the assertion of equality takes its political shape.” p. 39. However, I also wish
to use the word in the sense that a wrong runs counter to justice. A historical
wrong therefore is one in which issues of justice are erased from the enacted
event. This means that there is no shadow of justice that haunts the event, be-
cause those wronged are said to have no claims on justice.
6. Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), pp. 3–4.
7. Ruth Leys, Trauma: A Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2000), p. 2.
8. Ibid.
9. See Ron Eyerman, Cultural Trauma: Slavery and the Formation of African
American Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 2–4.
10. Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory,” in Inventing the Truth: The
Art and Craft of Memoir, ed. William Zinsser (Boston: Mariner Books, 1998),
pp. 190–91.
11. Sigmund Freud, Beyond the Pleasure Principle (New York: Norton,
1989), p. 11.
12. For a discussion of this, see Stephanie Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A
Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press, 2007), pp. 1–8.
13. Ibid., p. 152.
14. For a discussion of this tradition and its radical expressions, see Cedric
Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Lon-
don: Zed Press, 1983).
15. LaCapra, Writing History, Writing Trauma, p. 77.
16. Ibid., p. 78.
17. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery, p. 60.
18. Robert Gooding-Williams, Look, A Negro: Philosophical Essays on
Race, Culture and Politics (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 1.
19. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
20. Glenn Loury, “Ghettoes, Prisons and Racial Stigma” (The Tanner Lec-
tures, April 4, 2007), copy provided by author.
21. Howard Winant, The New Politics of Race (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 2004), p. 11.
22. How Race Is Lived in America (New York: Times Books, 2001), p. 26.

[ 129 ]
 Notes to pages 46–51

23. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 112.

24. W. E. B. DuBois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dodd, Mead and
Company, 1961), p. 1.
25. Donald Pease, “Tocqueville’s Democratic Thing; or, Aristocracy in Amer-
ica,” in Materializing Democracy: Toward a Revitalized Cultural Politics, ed.
Russ Castronovo and Dana Nelson (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002),
p. 23.
26. Ibid.
27. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Vin-
tage, 1990), p. 19.
28. Ibid., p. 3.
29. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans.
George Lawrence, 2 vols. (New York: Perennial, 2000), p. 504.
30. Sheldon Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds: The Making of a Po-
litical and Theoretical Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001),
p. 241.
31. Cited in Wolin, Tocqueville between Two Worlds, p. 251.
32. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990),
p. 9.
33. For a selection of Tocqueville’s writings on colonial empire, see Pitts,
Alexis de Tocqueville: Writings on Empire and Slavery.
34. Ibid., p. 200.
35. Ibid., p. 203.
36. Ibid., pp. 207–8.
37. See Gustave de Beaumont, Marie or, Slavery in the United States, trans.
Barbara Chapman, with a new introduction by Gerard Fergerson (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). In the introduction to Democracy in
America, Tocqueville makes reference to the work of his companion during his
visit to America, Gustave de Beaumont. While Beaumont’s novel and its socio-
logical appendixes explicitly argue that slavery was a negation of equality and
democracy in the U.S. and was therefore not an incidental issue, Tocqueville
was not influenced by this position. It confirms that he was committed to ideas
from philosophical anthropology about the human race that were constructed
upon a hierarchy of white superiority. In his text, Beaumont provides a brief
discussion of American women, as well as a short essay on social and political
equality in the U.S. and the role of white skin as a marker of privilege.
38. Tocqueville, Democracy in America, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1990),
p. 331.
39. Ibid.
40. Ibid., p. 332.
41. Ibid.

[ 130 ]
 Notes to pages 52–61

42. Ibid., p. 333.

43. Ibid., p. 358.
44. Ibid., p. 373.
45. The ACS was formed with the explicit purpose of raising funds and
formulating a plan to return free blacks to Africa. The driving idea behind the
plan was a growing fear of free blacks. Although some members of the organi-
zation opposed slavery, race was the primary motive. Henry Clay noted that
because of the unconquerable prejudice resulting from their color, blacks never
could amalgamate with the free whites of this country. Some white abolitionists
agreed, and some blacks also agreed. However, most organizations of free
blacks opposed the plan, and Frederick Douglass was in fierce opposition to it.
46. Nikhil Pal Singh, Black Is a Country (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-
sity Press, 2004), p. 92. It should be noted here that, while some historians have
attempted to build upon the work of DuBois in Black Reconstruction, the text
is still little studied. Besides Singh, see Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism (Lon-
don: Zed Press, 1987), in particular chapter 9.
47. Cited in Singh, Black Is a Country, p. 95.
48. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction, p. 727.
49. Ibid., p. 3.
50. Ibid., p. 5.
51. Ibid., pp. 9–10.
52. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage, 1989),
pp. 85–86.
53. Rancière, Disagreement, p. 11.
54. Dubois, Black Reconstruction, p. 67.
55. Ibid., pp. 122–23.
56. Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (London: Penguin, 1965), p. 21.
57. Ibid.
58. Ibid., p. 68.
59. Ibid., p. 71.
60. Dubois, Black Reconstruction, p. 124.
61. Ibid., p. 13.
62. Ibid., p. 182.
63. Ibid.
64. Ibid., p. 185.
65. W. E. B. DuBois, “Marxism and the Negro Problem,” in W. E. B. Du
Bois: A Reader, ed. David Levering Lewis (New York: Henry Holt and Com-
pany, 1995), p. 543.
66. John Dunn, “Conclusion,” in Democracy: The Unfinished Journey,
508 BC to AD 1993, ed. John Dunn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993),
pp. 240–41.

[ 131 ]
 Notes to pages 61–72

67. We of course need to acknowledge that this citizen self-rule was itself
limited to men and that Athens was a slave society. For a discussion of this fact
and the conceptions of slavery in both Athens and Rome, see Moses Finley,
Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology (Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener Publish-
ers, 1998).
68. Ernesto Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), p. 102.
69. The Levellers, The Putney Debates, with an introduction by Geoffrey
Robertson (London: Verso, 2007), p. 52.
70. Ibid., p. 53.
71. Stuart Hall, ed., Representation: Cultural Representations and Signify-
ing Practices (London: Sage Publications, 2003), p. 19.
72. Ella Baker, “Bigger than a Hamburger,” The Southern Patriot, May 1960.
73. Jacques Rancière, On the Shores of Politics (London: Verso, 1995),
p. 103.

Chapter 3: Death, Power, Violence, and New Sovereignties

1. Jean Hatzfeld, Machete Season: The Killers in Rwanda Speak (New York:
Picador, 2003), p. 10.
2. For example, see his recently published notes on Tasmania taken from his
proposed unwritten book on the history of genocide. The section on Tasmania
is published as Raphael Lemkin, “Tasmania,” in Colonialism and Genocide,
ed. A. Dirk Moses and Dan Stone (London: Routledge, 2007), pp. 74–100.
3. Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harvest/HBJ
Books, 1973), p. 461.
4. One of the most important texts to discuss this point is Mahmood Mam-
dani, When Victims Become Killers: Colonialism, Nativism, and the Genocide
in Rwanda (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).
5. Hatzfeld, Machete Season, p. 7.
6. See Jürgen Zimmerer, “The birth of the Ostland out of the spirit of colo-
nialism: a postcolonial perspective on the Nazi policy of conquest and exter-
mination,” in Moses and Stone, Colonialism and Genocide (see note 2 above),
pp. 101–23, for a discussion of this German general and how the military tactics
in his genocidal campaign against the Herero were repeated by the Nazis.
7. Hatzfeld, Machete Season, p. 13.
8. Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, in Peter Baehr, ed., The Portable
Hannah Arendt (New York: Penguin, 2000), p. 328.
9. Hatzfeld, Machete Season, p. 15.
10. Hannah Arendt, “The Image of Hell,” in Essays in Understanding, ed.
Jerome Kohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1994), p. 198.

[ 132 ]
 Notes to pages 72–77

11. Primo Levi, The Voice of Memory: Interviews, 1961–1987, ed. Marco
Belpoliti and Robert Gordon (New York: New Press, 2001), p. 195.
12. Ibid., p. 202.
13. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Com-
pany, 1969), p. 56.
14. Ibid., p. 65. I would suggest that a close reading of Arendt’s criticism of
Fanon illustrates that she is really reading the text through Sartre’s introduction
to the text.
15. Mary Douglas, “The Two Bodies,” in The Body: A Reader, ed. Mariam
Fraser and Monica Greco (New York: Routledge, 2005), p. 79.
16. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985),
p. 34.
17. Ibid.
18. Cited in Steven Lukes, ed., Power (New York: New York University
Press, 1986), p. 4.
19. Michel Foucault, “The Subject and Power,” in Power, ed. James Fau-
bion (New York: New Press, 2000), p. 337.
20. Ibid., p. 340.
21. Judith Shklar, “Putting Cruelty First” Daedalus 111, no. 3 (Summer
1982): pp. 17–28.
22. Ibid.
23. See in particular the debate between Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael
Walzer in Sanford Levinson, ed., Torture: A Collection (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2004), pp. 61–92.
24. David Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” in The Tor-
ture Debate in America, ed. Karen J. Greenberg (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2006), p. 36.
25. Ibid., p. 38.
26. Cited in Luban, “Liberalism, Torture, and the Ticking Bomb,” p. 75.
27. See the document in Karen Greenberg and Joshua Dratel, The Torture
Papers: The Road to Abu Ghraib (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2005), p. 237.
28. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New
York: Vintage, 1995), p. 9.
29. Ibid., p. 11.
30. I would also argue that, because this is so, when placed in pain these
excluded bodies can be made a spectacle of. In the twenty-first century, al-
though there is no public spectacle of punishment in liberal societies, the visual
recording of torture substitutes for this spectacle because pictures can be shown
widely. The use of photography in public spectacles of torture and death has a
long history in the United States, including the numerous pictures of lynched

[ 133 ]
 Notes to pages 77–82

slaves and ex-slaves taken and sent to friends and family by those who wit-
nessed the enactment of lynching. The pictures of Abu Ghraib followed this
established practice.
31. Greenberg and Dratel, Torture Papers, p. 55.
32. Colin Dayan, The Story of Cruel and Unusual (Cambridge, MA: MIT
Press, 2007), p. xv.
33. Ibid., p. 16.
34. The debates also ignore another ghost, the historical involvement of the
U.S. government in practices of torture in Latin America. For a discussion of
these extensive practices, see Jennifer Harbury, Truth, Torture and the American
Way (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005).
35. Marnia Lazreg, Torture and the Twilight of Empire: From Algiers to
Baghdad (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 121.
36. Ibid., p. 253.
37. Allen Feldman, Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and
Political Terror in Northern Ireland (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1991), p. 5.
38. Brian Meeks has argued that the current crisis in the Caribbean is in
part the result of the dissolution of hegemony. See Brian Meeks, Narratives of
Resistance (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2000). David
Scott has consistently argued this position about Bandung. See in particular
David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999).
39. A section of this discussion of Jamaica has been published in various
places. See in particular Anthony Bogues, “Power, Violence and the Jamaican
‘Shotta Don’” Report on the Americas, special issue, NACLA 39, no. 6 (May–
June 2006).
40. Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2001), p. 25.
41. The term “bare life” has become popular in contemporary Western politi-
cal philosophy. It connotes a life that is limited to biological reproduction and
that is distinguishable from the end of the politics, which is about human capacity
and the structuring of common life. For slaves in Atlantic societies, very often not
even bare life was permitted. For a discussion of bare life, see Andrew Norris,
“Giorgio Agamben and the Politics of the Living Dead,” in Politics, Metaphys-
ics and Death, ed. Andrew Norris (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
42. W. E. B. DuBois, Black Reconstruction (New York: Atheneum, 1962),
p. 9.
43. See Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race and Gender
in Jamaican State Formation, 1780–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2004).

[ 134 ]
 Notes to pages 82–88

44. Horace Russell, “The Emergence of the Christian Black: The Making of
a Stereotype,” Jamaica Journal 16, no. 1 (1983): pp. 51–58.
45. Michel Foucault, Power, Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984,
vol. 3, ed. James D. Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: New Press,
2000), p. 341.
46. This process is described in many texts, but see Philip Curtin, Two Ja-
maicas: The Role of Ideas in a Tropical Colony, 1830–1865 (New York: Athe-
neum, 1970).
47. Cited in Neither Led nor Driven, p. 53.
48. Of course this reinterpretation belongs to two kinds of Afro-Jamaican
religious practices, Rastafari and Native Baptist.
49. See of course Barry Chevannes’s important study on Rastafari, Barry
Chevannes, Rastafari: Roots and Ideology (Kingston, Jamaica: University of
West Indies Press, 1995).
50. See Diane J. Austin-Broos, Jamaica Genesis: Religion and the Politics
of Moral Orders (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle Press, 1997).
51. Cited in Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics, Black Prophets: Radical Po-
litical Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003), p. 191.
52. The figure of Ivan is based upon the Jamaican folklore character
Rhyging.
53. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press,
1963), p. 94.
54. George Beckford, “Introduction” to Erna Brodber, Standing Tall: Affir-
mations of the Jamaican Male (Kingston, Jamaica: Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of
Social and Economic Research, 2003), p. 29.
55. Terry Lacy, Violence and Politics in Jamaica, 1960–1970 (Manchester:
Manchester University Press, 1977), p. 28.
56. Ibid., p. 32.
57. Ibid., p. 33.
58. The definition of the relationship between clientage and political power
is Carl Stone’s. Cited in David Scott, “Rationalities of the Jamaican Modern,”
Small Axe, no. 14 (September 2003): p. 1.
59. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press, 1996), p. 26.
60. Ibid., p. 27.
61. The interviews on which this lecture is based were done in 1999 in
an urban community that we will call Cascade Gardens. This community is an
inner-city community that has had an extensive history of political violence and
warfare. I want to thank the entire 1999 graduate class in Caribbean politics at
the University of the West Indies for agreeing to participate in this project. Many
of the interviews were conducted by them. Also thanks to Judith Wedderburn,

[ 135 ]
 Notes to pages 88–93

Veraldo Barnett, and Sherine Mackenzie, who worked with the project and
made it possible. In particular I want to thank most profoundly the members of
this community who spoke openly and shared many aspects of their lives with
me. From them I have learned much that cannot be repaid.
62. Interview in Cascade Gardens, 1999. This can be translated roughly as,
“anybody who is caught has to die. You will not allow your enemy to live.” All
the voices of those interviewed will be in Jamaican nation–language, and, when
appropriate, I will translate.
63. Interview in Cascade Gardens, 1999. This is translated as “From you
are informed by the sound of a stone hitting your fence, you know that you are
asked to be up all night by some of the youths who are your friends. So you go
and stay with them on the corner.”
64. Ibid.
65. Lorna Goodison, “Jamaica 1980,” in Selected Poems (Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1992), p. 38.
66. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Com-
pany, 1969), p. 4.
67. See Michel Foucault, “Subject and Power,” in Michel Foucault, Power
(New York: New Press, 2000), pp. 326–48.
68. Achille Mbembe, “Necropolitics,” Public Culture 15, no. 1 (2003): p. 11.
69. Interview in Cascade Gardens.
70. Rex Nettleford, Inward Stretch, Outward Reach: A Voice from the Ca-
ribbean (London: Macmillan Caribbean, 1993), pp. 80–90.
71. The closest it came to this hegemony was perhaps in the period be-
tween 1972 and 1977, during the regime of Michael Manley and the PNP
government.
72. There are two types of area leaders in many communities. One type is
deeply connected to the two-party political system, while the other is a semi-
independent figure. It is the latter that I am concerned with. While I was proof-
reading this manuscript, the U.S. government requested the extradition of one
of Jamaica’s dons, Christopher Coke. After stalling for many months the Jamai-
can government agreed to this request. The move to execute the warrant for
his arrest created (up to the time of this note) four days of violence in various
parts of the island. The civilian death toll at this point (May 27, 2010) stands
at seventy-three. In a profound sense Jamaican politics is today at a watershed
moment as the “shotta don” becomes embedded within segments of the politi-
cal and social system of the island.
73. See Diana Paton, No Bond but the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2004). Paton observes that in nineteenth-century Jamaica, the existence
of alternative justice systems depended upon the headman.

[ 136 ]
 Notes to pages 93–103

74. F. G. Cassidy and R. B. Le Page, in their classic Dictionary of Jamaican

English (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press, 2002), give us an
important description of the duppy. The duppy is a ghost with a specific set of
meanings in the Afro-Jamaican worldview. Cassidy and Page write of “The
spirit of the dead, believed to be capable of returning to aid or more often to
harm living beings” (p. 164). In my experience in rural Jamaica, people believe
that duppies are ghosts who refuse to die and who are always around. It is felt
that they have a life of their own and exist in passages between this world and
another one. I think it is of some importance that the word is used by these
urban young men in describing acts that result in the deaths of others.
75. Interview in Cascade Gardens, 1999.
76. Cited in Obika Gray, Demanded but Empowered: The Social Power of
the Urban Poor in Jamaica (Kingston, Jamaica: University of West Indies Press,
2004), p. 244.
77. For a discussion of this and two case studies, particularly one in the
community of August Town, see Horace Levy, “Peace in August Town” (un-
published paper).
78. Judith Butler, Precarious Life (London: Verso, 2004), p. 38.

Chapter 4: The End of History or the Invention of Existence

1. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations:

Essays and Reflections of Walter Benjamin, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York:
Schocken Books, 1968), p. 257.
2. For a discussion of slavery, see in particular Aristotle, Politics, ed. Steven
Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), Book 1.
3. Ibid.
4. For a discussion of the centrality of 1492 and Columbus’s voyages, see
Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Ori-
gins of the Americas, ed. Vera Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, D.C.:
Smithsonian Institution, 1995), pp. 5–57.
5. Free-dom. I am separating the word to linguistically mark the relation-
ship between domination and imperial freedom that I have been working with
throughout this lecture series.
6. Alex Callinicos, Theories and Narratives: Reflections on the Philosophy
of History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995), p. 165.
7. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illumina-
tions (see note 1), p. 262.

[ 137 ]
 Notes to pages 103–110

8. Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Interpretation of the

Folk Dance as a Cultural Process” Jamaica Journal 4, no. 2 (June 1970): 35.
9. Georg Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1975), p. 19.
10. Ibid., p. 53.
11. From www.whitehouse.gov/stateofunion/2003/index.html.
12. For a discussion of this, see Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the
World, or, Globalization (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007),
chapter 1.
13. Stuart Hall, “The West and the Rest: Discourse and Power,” in Forma-
tions of Modernity, ed. Stuart Hall and Bram Gieben (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1992), pp. 275–332.
14. Ibid.
15. Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics (New York: Schocken Books,
2005), p. 40.
16. Clifford Geertz, Local Knowledge (Boston: Basic Books, 1983), chapter 8.
17. Of course the term critical theory is usually associated with the Frank-
furt Institute for Social Research and was initially derived from the work of the
various members of the Frankfurt School: Adorno, Fromm, Horkheimer, Mar-
cuse, and Benjamin. Intellectually, the term has its roots in a Kantian critique
and in Marx’s critique of ideology. My argument is that the framing of the
many questions asked by various members of this school of thought was shaped
by the emergence of Fascism as a catastrophic event.
18. Cited in Richard Tuck, Hobbes: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2002), p. 29.
19. Thomas Hobbes, The Leviathan (New York: Prometheus Books, 1988).
The entire fourteenth chapter of this seminal text is taken up with the explication,
in different ways, of the establishment of the social contract, seen in political
theory as the originary formation of political society. Of course the masculine
and racial nature of this contract has come under severe and, to my mind, jus-
tifiable critique. See in particular Carole Pateman and Charles Mills, Contract
and Domination (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).
20. See Bryan Edwards, The History, Civil and Commercial of the British
West Indies, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: 1806), p. 32.
21. Paul Ricoeur, History and Truth (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University
Press, 1965), p. 34.
22. When thinking about the question of the human today, one is of course
confronted with the remarkable developments in the fields of genetics and neu-
roscience. However, as critical as these new developments are, I do not believe
they constitute a basis for discussing a definitive post-human stage for human-
kind. What is most human in us is not that we are biologically determined but

[ 138 ]
 Notes to pages 110–114

that we are socially and culturally shaped. Therefore as a species we are capable
of change and adaptation. For an attempt to think about how the post-human
need not be anti-human, see N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Post Human
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999).
23. John Edgar Wideman, Fanon (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company,
2008), p. 222.
24. Stuart Hall, “The Afterlife of Frantz Fanon: Why Fanon? Why Now?
Why Black Skin, White Masks?” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and
Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read (Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), p. 14.
25. Lewis Gordon, Fanon and the Crisis of European Man (New York:
Routledge, 1995), p. 86.
26. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpre-
tation of Religion (Aurora, IL: Demes Group Publishing, 1995), p. 212. I want to
thank my colleague Corey Walker for introducing me to the work of Charles Long.
27. Ato Sekyi-Otu, Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience (Cambridge, MA: Har-
vard University Press, 1996), p. 4.
28. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 217.
29. Ibid.
30. Ibid., p. 220.
31. Ibid.
32. Ibid.
33. Ibid., pp. 220–21.
34. Ibid.
35. For the classic discussion in English about the revolution, see C. L. R.
James, The Black Jacobins (London: Allison and Busby, 1980).
36. This can be discerned from the many historical accounts of ex-slave
life in post-emancipation Caribbean society. For example, see Frank McGlynn
and Seymour Drescher, eds., The Meaning of Freedom (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1992); Frederick Cooper, Thomas Holt, and Rebecca Scott,
eds., Beyond Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
37. See Kojeve’s discussion of Hegel’s work in Alexandre Kojeve, Introduc-
tion to the Reading of Hegel (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), espe-
cially chapter 1.
38. Carolyn Fick, The Making of Haiti: The Saint Domingue Revolution
from Below (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1990), p. 179.
39. For a discussion of this, see Anthony Bogues, “The slave work so do we,
what’s the difference,” in Caribbean Thought and the Radical Imagination
(Princeton, NJ: Markus Wiener, 2010). For a full discussion of the Haitian
Revolution and its meanings for freedom in the modern world, see Anthony
Bogues, Singing Songs of Freedom: Freedom and Black Radical Intellectual
Tradition (forthcoming).

[ 139 ]
 Notes to pages 114–119

40. The evidence is sufficient to understand the Haitian Revolution as a dual

revolution. The first revolution abolished slavery and culminated in the 1801
Constitution promulgated by Toussaint L’Ouverture. The second revolution
was the one for political independence, marked by the Haitian Declaration of
Independence of 1804.
41. Cited in Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 223.
42. Aimé Césaire, Notebook of a Return to My Native Land, trans. Mireille
Rosello and Annie Pritchard (Newcastle Upon Tyne, UK: Bloodaxe Books,
1995), p. 117.
43. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 225.
44. For a discussion of dread history, see Anthony Bogues, Black Heretics and
Black Prophets: Radical Political Intellectuals (New York: Routledge, 2003).
45. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 222.
46. Ibid., p. 229.
47. Ibid.
48. Ibid., p. 231.
49. Ibid., p. 232.
50. In a set of conversations with me, John Edgar Wideman has insisted
that we call the “new humanism” a radical humanism. He may be right, not
only because we need to rethink what the human means in humanism, but be-
cause we need to do so from a radical perspective, one that opens up new cat-
egories of thought.
51. For a discussion, see Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archae-
ology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994), chapter 10.
52. For a fuller discussion of this point, see Anthony Bogues, “And What
about the Human? Radical Anti-Colonial Thought and Critical Thinking,” in
Who Can Act for the Human? ed. Taieb Belghazi, Mohammed Ezroura, and
Ronald Judy (Rabat, Morocco: Mohammed V University, Publications of the
Faculty of Letters and Human Sciences, 2009), pp. 51–63.
53. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, p. 232.
54. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press,
1963), p. 316.
55. David Macy, Critical Theory (London: Penguin, 2000), p. 74.
56. For a selection of the writings of this school, see Andrew Arato and Eike
Gebhardt, eds., The Essential Frankfurt School (London: Continuum, 2007).

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edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107–69. Boulder,
CO: Paradigm Press, 2006.

[ 148 ]
index
abolition, 7, 59–60, 67, 81–82, 113
Abu Ghraib, 32–34, 134n30
Adorno, Theodor, 29–30, 138n17
Afghanistan, 77
Agamben, Giorgio, 29, 31–32
Algeria, 49, 78–79, 125n37
Althusser, Louis, 2, 23–24
American Black Power movement, 85
American Colonization Society
(ACS), 52–53, 131n45
American exceptionalism, 27
American power: as deployment of
democracy/freedom, 11–12,
14–16; as imperial power, 9, 26;
nation building and, 124n12;
stages of consolidation of, 16; as
structure of feeling, 25
American Revolution, 57–58, 102
American Samoa, 34
Arendt, Hannah: “banality of evil”
principle, 71–72; on colonial
power, 21; on “dark times”
historical exceptionalism, 101–2;
on genocide, 69, 71; on political
power, 16, 120; on revolution,
57–58; on violence as means-end
instrument, 90–91; on violence vs.
power, 73–74, 101; on Western
political silence, 107
Aristotle, 6, 97, 100
Armenian genocide, 69
Augustine, Saint, Bishop of Hippo, 6
Austin-Broos, Diane, 83
Badiou, Alan, 102
Baker, Ella, 63
“banality of evil” principle, 71
“bare life,” 82, 134n41
Barlow, Joel, 15
Bataille, Georges, 93
Battle of Algiers, The, 78
Bauman, Zygmunt, 25
Beaumont, Gustave de, 130n37
Beckford, George, 85
Benjamin, Walter, 99, 103, 119,
138n17
Bercovitch, Sacvan, 22
Beveridge, Albert, 15
bio-politics, 4–5, 7, 17–18, 35,
123n5
bios-politics, 17–18
black internationalism, 43–44
black nationalist movement, 92–93
Black Reconstruction, 53–54, 64–65,
67, 131n46. See also DuBois,
W. E. B.
body: domination of the body in
slavery, 31, 39–40, 82; genocidal
death and, 72–74; post-humanism
and, 138n22; racial domination
 Index
body (continued):
and, 39–40, 46; sovereign power
and, 31, 70–71; torture of
excluded bodies, 77, 133n30;
traumatic saturation of, 44;
violence and, 90
Bounti Killa, 94
Bourdieu, Pierre, 35
Boyd, Julian, 13–14
British Empire, 26
Burchell, Graham, 36
Burke, Edmund, 5, 13
Bush, George W., 4–5, 21–22, 24–25,
76–78, 105
Butler, Judith, 97
Callinicos, Alex, 102–3
Caruth, Cathy, 41–42
Casas, Bartolomé de las, 108
Castoriadis, Cornelius, 63
Castro, Fidel, 85
Césaire, Aimé, 21, 116
Cherokee Nation v. State of Georgia
(1831), 34
Churchill, Winston, 12
Cicero, 11, 35
citizenship: American liberalism and,
27; in Greek democracy, 99–100;
imperial citizens, 29; racial
exclusion and, 31–34, 85; in the
Roman empire, 14
civilization, 20, 21
civil rights movement, 45, 63, 85
Clay, Henry, 52–53, 131n45
Cliff, Jimmy, 84
colonialism: as arena of historical
questioning, 107–8; coercive fear
as necessity, 109; colonial power,
20–21, 81–83, 125n37; critical
theory and, 119; genocide and,
68–69, 75; historical treatment of,
[ 150 ]
78–79; locus of colonial power,
26. See also colonial modernity
colonial modernity: coloniality-
modernity relationship, 78,
127n71; effect on contemporary
life, 107, 109, 121; emergence of
liberalism and, 21; historical and
social trauma and, 100; liberty
and, 37; representation and, 62
Columbus, Christopher, 6, 100–101
common sense, 4, 36
Commune in Paris, 102
Communism, 85–86
Conklin, Alice, 20
conscience, 18–19
constitutional representativeness, 67
consumption, 19–20, 25
Cooper, Robert, 22–23
Crashaw, William, 28
critical theory, 8, 119–20, 138n17
cruel and unusual punishment,
32–34, 78
Cuban Revolution, 85–86
Curtin, Phillip, 83
Dayan, Colin, 30, 32, 78
death: as definitive of humanity, 97;
genocidal death, 72–74; historical
dialogue with the dead, 116–17;
as performance of power, 7; as
self-fashioning spectacle, 93–94,
101, 137n74; social death,
30–31, 82
democracy: as empty signifier, 61–63,
67, 99–100; equality as principle
of, 38–39, 46–48, 79–80;
historical wrongs relationship
with, 64–65; liberty as principle
of, 48; limits of imperial democ-
racy, 79–80; as process vs.
experience, 7, 46–47, 62–65;
 Index
slavery as problem for, 7, 49–50,
59–60, 130n37; as universal
truth, 11–12, 14–15, 21–22, 59;
zoon politikon concept and, 6
Democracy in America, 47–53,
64–65, 67, 130n37. See also
Tocqueville, Alexis de
Demosthenes, 61
Derrida, Jacques, 105–6
Descartes, René, 109
desire: in American imperial power,
12; bio-political power and,
17–18; consumption and, 19–20,
25; invoked by “strong words,”
15; pastoral power and, 18–19;
as soft power, 25
Dewey, John, 61
diaspora, 43–44
domestic dependent nations, 34, 99
domination: liberty as, 36–37;
political subjectivity, 16–18; racial
domination as historical moment,
12; self-regulating free-dom and,
101–2, 105, 120, 137n5; slavery
as social death, 82
double structure of liberalism,
27–29, 32, 37
Douglas, Mary, 74
Douglass, Frederick, 39–40,
131n45
dread history, 116–17
Dred Scott case, 30, 78
DuBois, W. E. B.: on abolition
democracy, 7, 59–60, 67; as
anti-imperialist writer, 2–3; on
black invisibility, 44; Black
Reconstruction, 53–54, 64–65,
67, 103, 131n46; on detached
witnessing, 46; on domination in
slavery, 82; on emancipation,
58–59; sites of exception and, 99
[ 151 ]
Dunn, John, 61
Dussell, Enrique, 8
economy: American Revolution and,
57–58; consumption as desire,
19–20, 25; ethic of the market,
3–4; slavery as economic force,
55–56, 59–60; wage labor in
Marxism, 114–15
Edwards, Bryan, 109
Eichmann, Adolf, 71
empire: defined, 10–11; as civilizing
mission, 11; as logic and structure
of rule, 10; as single unique
power, 10–11, 124n9; totalizing
capacity of, 66–67
“empire of liberty” concept:
American Century project and, 5;
constitutional representativeness
and, 67; death as horizon in, 97;
“empire of democracy” in
Tocqueville, 48–49; imperial
liberalism and, 23; Jeffersonian
concept of, 13–14; reformulation
of, 98–99; self-regulation and, 67
Enlightenment, 12
epistemological location, 102
equality: democracy as representa-
tion of, 38–39, 46–47, 61–63,
79–80; racial inequality, 27–28;
in Tocqueville, 27, 48–50
ethic of the market, 3–4
Ethiopianism, 43–44
executions, 77
failed states, 33–34, 77–78, 128n75.
See also nation-states
Fanon, Frantz: on colonial power,
21; critical views on, 110–12;
formulation of history by,
116–17; on invention, 117–18,
 Index
Fanon, Frantz (continued):
121; on Marxist social revolution,
115–16; radical humanism of,
117–19; on slavery, 40; on
traumatic saturation of the black
body, 44–45; on violence, 73–74,
84–85
Fascism, 12, 21, 107
Feldman, Allen, 80
Fick, Carolyn, 114
Fisher, Katherine, 19
flogging, 82, 86
Foucault, Michel: on bio-politics, 7,
17, 35, 123n5; on Enlightenment
as historical moment, 12; on
liberal power, 21; on pastoral
power, 18–19; on the political
body, 74; on political subjectivity,
16–17; on power as productive
force, 81; on punishment, 77; on
sovereign power, 31, 70–71; on
the sovereignty of the subject,
118; on the thematics of power, 75
Frankfurt School, 119, 138n17
Freedman Humanities Lecture Series,
1–3, 5–6
freedom: as civil rights ambition,
63–64; consumption and, 19–20,
25; ethic of the market and, 4;
Fanon ontology of freedom,
117–18; imperial freedom, 5–6;
as negation of life, 101; perspec-
tive of the unfree and, 8; as
political free-dom, 66–67, 101–2,
105, 120, 137n5; slave freedom,
31, 56, 67, 113–15; as universal
truth, 11–12, 14–15, 21–22; wage
labor and, 114–15
French Empire: French abolition
movement, 113–14; historical
treatment of, 78–79; mission
[ 152 ]
civilisatrice in French colonialism,
20; territory as fundamental to,
26; Tocqueville support for, 49,
125n37; torture as component of,
79–80
French Revolution, 102
Freud, Sigmund, 41–42, 110
Fromm, Erich, 138n17
Fukuyama, Francis, 105
Gama, Vasco da, 6
Garvey, Marcus, 43–44, 92–93
Geertz, Clifford, 107
genetics, 138n22
Geneva conventions, 77
genocide: overview, 68–75, 90;
colonialism and, 68–69, 75; as
performance of power, 7; as
racial cleansing, 70–71; social
conditions for, 69–70; sovereign
power and, 70–71; as spectacle
of purification, 71–72. See also
violence
German Empire, 26, 69–70
Godelier, Maurice, 99–100
Gooding-Williams, Robert, 44
Goodison, Lorna, 89
Gordon, Lewis, 110
Goveia, Elsa, 30, 100
Gramsci, Antonio, 4, 36
Gray, John, 22
Greek democracy, 61, 99–100,
132n67
Guam, 34
Guantánamo Bay naval base, 32–34
Guevara, Che, 85
Guillén, Nicolás, 30
Guyana, 80–81
Haile Selassie, 85
Haiti, 49, 55, 140n40
 Index
Haitian Revolution, 49, 53, 55,
113–15, 140n40
Hakluyt, Richard, 28
Hall, Stuart, 2, 23–24, 62, 106, 110
Harder They Come, The, 84
Hardt, Michael, 10
Hartman, Saidiya, 39
Hartz, Louis, 27
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich,
104–7, 110, 112–14
hegemony: imperial freedom
compared with, 11–12; as mode
of domination, 17; obscurity of
alternatives by, 26; racial
domination and, 45; violence
and, 134n38
Heidegger, Martin, 109
Henzell, Perry, 84
Herero genocide, 69–70
historically catastrophic events,
38–39, 40, 58–59, 102–3, 107.
See also trauma
history: advent of “man” in, 109;
Arendt “dark times” historical
exceptionalism, 101–2; colonial-
ism and, 78–79; Enlightenment
and, 12; fascism and, 12; Hegelian
“end of history,” 104–10; his-
torical telos as closure, 105–6;
historical trauma, 41–44;
historical vs. structural trauma,
43; historical wrongs and
democracy, 64–65; liberalism and,
12; production of freedom from,
116–17; racial domination and,
12; states of exception and,
98–99. See also historically
catastrophic events
Hobbes, Thomas, 18, 107–8,
138n19
Hobson, J. A., 26
[ 153 ]
Holocaust, 69, 74
Horkheimer, Max, 138n17
Hughes, Langston, 37
humanity: abrogation of rights and,
109; anti-colonial tradition and,
8; death as definitive of humanity,
97; democratic subjectivity and,
6; homo oeconomicus, 25;
humanness as constitutive of
freedom, 121; human perfect-
ibility, 20; logic of affliction and,
83; natural liberty and, 36;
normative anthropos perspective,
109; post-humanism, 138n22;
racial classification, 7; radical
humanism, 118, 140n50; slavery
and, 40, 42, 51
imperial citizens, 29
imperial freedom: defined, 5–6;
free-dom domination relationship,
101–2, 105, 120, 137n5;
hegemony compared with, 11–12;
regeneration/creativity in, 15;
representation/discourse and, 5–6;
self-regulation and, 10, 12;
slavery and, 58–59
inclusion/exclusion: construction of
democracy and, 7, 47–48, 55, 65;
in Greek democracy, 99–100;
“political kingdom” as civil rights
ambition, 63–64; racial exclusion,
31–34, 85; torture and, 77,
134n30
instituting events, 100–101
International Monetary Fund (IMF),
1–2
invention, 117–18, 121
Iraq War, 4–5. See also Bush,
George W.; September 11, 2001;
terror
 Index
Jamaica: decolonization effects in,
1–2; duppy figure, 93, 137n74;
ethnographic research project on,
88, 135n61; Jamaican colonial
rule, 82–83; Jamaican peace
movement, 94–96; political
violence, 80–81, 86–90; Rude
Bwoy figure, 84–86, 94; Shotta
Don figure, 92–97, 101, 136n72
James, C. L. R., 3, 53, 55, 62
Jefferson, Thomas, 5, 13–14, 52
Judy, Roland, 4
Kafka, Franz, 72
Kant, Immanuel, 12, 138n17
Kaplan, Roger, 14
King, Martin Luther, Jr., 63
Kohl, Helmut, 3–4
Kojeve, Alexandre, 113–14
Lacan, Jacques, 25, 110
LaCapra, Dominick, 40, 43
Laclau, Ernesto, 2, 61
Lacy, Terry, 85–86
language: American liberty as
speech-act, 34–36; colonial power
and, 21; desire in “strong words,”
15; genocide and, 71–72; Logos
as ideology, 23–24; the West as
generative epistemological
concept, 106
Lazreg, Marnia, 79
Leach, William, 19
Lemkin, Raphel, 68
Levellers, 62
Levi, Primo, 72
Levinas, Emmanuel, 107
Leys, Ruth, 41
liberalism: dilemma of violence and,
16–17, 20–21, 133n30; genealogy
of American liberalism, 28; as
[ 154 ]
historical moment, 12; imperial
liberalism, 22–23; liberalism of
rights, 27–28; sites of exception
for, 31–34; socialism and, 27
liberty: as domination, 36–37;
Jeffersonian concept of, 5, 13–14;
natural liberty, 13, 36–37; as
normalized polity, 36; self-
government and, 13, 61; as
self-regulated political freedom,
66–67; as structure of feeling,
24–25; Tocqueville concept of,
34, 48
Lieven, Dominic, 10
livity, 120
Locke, John, 13, 18, 27, 30
logic of affliction, 83
Long, Charles, 111
Loury, Glenn, 44–45
Luban, David, 76
lynching, 133n30
Lyotard, Jean-François, 106
Madison, James, 52–53
Manent, Pierre, 10–11
Marcuse, Herbert, 138n17
Marley, Bob, 92–93, 93–94
Marx, Karl, 112
Marxism: class violence in Jamaica
and, 86–87; DuBois influence by,
60; Frankfurt School critical
theory, 119, 138n17; social
revolution in, 115–16; wage
labor as slavery in, 114–15
Massop, Claude, 94–95
Massu, Jacques, 79
May 1968 events, 102
Mbembe, Achille, 20, 91
Mead, Fogg, 19
Meeks, Brian, 134n38
Mexican War, 15
 Index

Mill, John Stuart, 21 Pontecorvo, Gillo, 78

Mills, Charles, 34 Portuguese Revolution, 102
modernity, 78, 100–101, 121, power: death/violence as perfor-
127n71. See also colonial mance of, 7; as opposite of
modernity violence, 73–74, 101; pastoral
Morrison, Toni, 42 power, 18–19; politics of being
and, 120; self-regulating free-dom
Nambia, 69 and, 101–2, 105; soft power, 25;
Nancy, Jean-Luc, 106 thematics of power, 75. See also
nation building, 124n12 American power
nation-states: black nationalist Price, Richard, 13
movement, 92–93; consolidation prisons, 78
of freedom in, 104; domestic Puerto Rico, 34
dependent nations, 34, 99; failed punishment: cruel and unusual
states, 33–34, 77–78, 128n75; punishment, 32–34, 78; public
legitimacy of power in, 17; nation executions, 77; school flogging in
building, 124n12; sovereignty Jamaica, 86; slave beatings, 32,
relationship with, 18 39, 82
Native Americans, 15–16, 34, 50, 99
Nazism, 107 race/racism: classification of human
necropolitics, 16–17 beings and, 6–7; debasement
Negri, Antonio, 10 argument and, 52; racial contract,
neoliberalism, 4, 22–23 34; racial exclusion from the
Nettleford, Rex, 92 body politic, 31–34, 69–70, 85;
neuroscience, 138n22 Tocqueville on racial superiority,
Nietzsche, Friedrich, 80, 104–5 50
Nye, Joseph, 25 racial domination: black incarcera-
tion rates, 44–45, 47; contempo-
Paine, Thomas, 15 rary practice of, 121; as historical
Parsons, Talcott, 74–75 moment, 12; racism as repetition
pastoral power, 18–19 of the wound of slavery, 44;
Paton, Diana, 82 slavery as ultimate degradation,
Patterson, Orlando, 30–31, 81–82 53; slavery as violence, 39–40;
Paul, the Apostle, Saint, 24 as state of exception, 40
Pease, Donald, 28–29, 47 racial inequality, 27–28
Pericles, 61 radical humanism, 118, 140n50
Peterson, Merrill, 5 Rancière, Jacques, 7, 56, 61, 65,
Pinckney, Thomas, 13 129n5
Pocock, J. P., 27 Randolph, John, 52–53
politics of the radical imagination, Rastafari, 83–86, 88, 92, 94–96,
120 120

[ 155 ]
 Index
Reagan, Ronald, 3–4
religion: Afro-Christian subjectivity,
82–83; Bush administration
theo-political philosophy, 105;
emancipation and, 56–57, 58–59;
Hegelian “end of history” and,
104–5; pastoral power, 18–19;
Puritan Idealism as universal
democracy, 59; Rastafari, 83–86,
88, 92, 94–96, 120; virgin land
doctrine and, 28
republic (form of government), 10
res nullius doctrine, 28
revolution: epistemological location
and, 102; imperial freedom and,
57–59; slavery and, 49, 53, 55.
See also particular revolutions
Ricoeur, Paul, 109
rights: abrogation of rights, 107–9;
coercive domination vs. self-
regulation and, 45; freedom as
civil rights ambition, 63–64;
liberalism of rights, 27–28
Roman empire, 14
Rude Bwoy, 84–86, 94
Rumsfeld, Donald, 76–77
Russell, Horace, 82
Rwandan genocide, 68–69, 71, 74
Scarry, Elaine, 74, 76
Schmitt, Carl, 87–88
security: empire of liberty and, 97;
Jamaican violence and, 86–87;
liberalism and, 17, 23; liberty
synonymous with, 36; post-9/11
Homeland Security State, 28–29;
sovereignty and, 18
Sekyi-Otu, Ato, 112
self-government, 3–4, 13, 26, 61–63
self-regulation: bio-politics and,
17–18; consumption and, 19–20;
[ 156 ]
hegemony compared with, 11–12;
imperial freedom and, 10, 12;
liberty constructed from, 66–67;
as political free-dom, 101–2,
105, 120
September 11, 2001, 28–29, 76–78
Sepúlveda, Juan Ginés de, 108
Shklar, Judith, 27–28, 76
Singh, Nikhil, 53
sites of exception, 31–34, 99
slavery: abolition as civilizing
mission, 21; abolition of Jamaican
slavery, 81–82; abrogation of
rights and, 108–9; American
Revolution and, 57–58; black
abolitionism, 113; civil vs. social
death and, 30–31; classification of
human beings and, 6–7; colonial
power and, 81–83; debasement
argument and, 52; democracy
incompatibility with, 7, 49–50,
59–60, 130n37; in Greek
democracy, 99–100, 132n67;
master-slave dialectic, 112–14;
ontological legacy of, 29–30,
112–14; pastoral power and, 19;
prison system as legacy of, 78;
racial slavery as “property in the
person,” 55, 100; recolonization
movement, 52–53, 131n45; role
in American imperialism, 16; as
site of exception, 99; slave
freedom, 31, 56, 67, 113–15;
as social death, 82, 134n41;
sovereign power and, 31; as
traumatic event, 42–44; violence
as fundamental to, 39–40
Smallwood, Stephanie, 42–43
Smith, Roger, 27
soft power, 25
Solon, 100
 Index
Sontag, Susan, 70
sovereignty: colonial sovereignty, 20;
individualization/totalization
procedures in, 18–19; political
obligation and, 16–18; self-
government fundamental to, 26;
sovereign power, 31, 70–71,
107–8; violence fundamental to,
70–71, 91
Soviet Union, 102
Spanish Civil War, 102
speech-acts, 34–36
states of emergency, 99
states of exception: overview, 29–30;
ahistorical character of, 98–99;
domestic dependent nations, 34;
racial domination as, 40; sites of
exception and, 31–34, 99
Stephens, Thaddeus, 59
St. Lucia, 80–81
“strong words” (Williams), 15
Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC), 63
subjectivity: Afro-Christian subjectiv-
ity, 82–83; agency as a material
practice, 80; colonial subjectivity,
21; Fanon ontology of freedom,
117–18; political obligation and,
16–18; reciprocal recognition in
slavery, 112; slavery as social
death, 82
sufferers, 83
Taney, Roger, 30, 78
territory, 10, 18, 26, 34
terror, 70–72, 76–78
Thatcher, Margaret, 3–4
Thirteenth Amendment (U. S.
Constitution), 78
Thompson, Aston “Buckie,” 94–95
Thucydides, 61
[ 157 ]
Tocqueville, Alexis de: on American
liberty, 34; on colonial power,
125n37; Democracy in America,
47–53, 64–65, 67, 130n37;
“empire of democracy” in, 48–49;
equality vs. liberty in, 47–48; on
French colonialism, 49, 125n37;
Hartz influence by, 27; on innate
equality, 27; on race and slavery,
49–50, 130n37
torture: overview, 90; in the Algerian
War of Independence, 79;
contemporary practice of, 120;
destruction of the self in, 74;
interrogation and, 76–77,
134n30; liberalism and, 23; sites
of exception and, 32–34; as
spectacle, 133n30; violence and,
76–80
Tosh, Peter, 85, 96
Toussaint L’Ouverture, 140n40
trauma: civil rights movement
treatment of, 63–64; historical vs.
structural trauma, 43; politics of
the wound, 40; racial slavery as,
42–44; social legacy of, 38–39;
trauma studies, 41; witnessing
of, 44. See also historically
catastrophic events; violence
Trinidad, 80–81
Trotha, Lothar von, 70
Turnipseed v. State (1844), 32
Universal Negro Improvement
Association, 43–44
urban poor, the, 80
violence: overview, 90–92; colonial
power and, 20, 125n37; death as
spectacle and, 93–94; Jamaican
political violence, 86–90;
 Index
violence (continued):
Jamaican Rude Bwoy violence,
84–86, 94; neoliberalism and,
23; as opposite of power, 73–74,
101; as performance of power, 7;
political vs. intimate violence, 90;
sovereignty relationship with,
70–71, 91; torture and, 76–80.
See also genocide; trauma
Virgin Islands, 34
virgin land doctrine, 28
Waldron, Jeremy, 78
Washington, Busrod, 52–53
Washington, George, 52–53
ways of life: American liberty as
model, 12, 14, 16; consumption
and, 25; critical view of, 120;
imperial power and, 21–22;
practice of democracy and, 6,
61; practice of freedom and, 8;
self-regulation and, 17
Weber, Max, 74–75
[ 158 ]
Webster, Daniel, 52–53
Wideman, John Edgar, 110,
140n50
Williams, Eric, 55
Williams, Raymond, 15, 20, 24
Williams, William Appleman, 16
Winant, Howard, 45
witnessing, 44, 46, 77, 133n30
Wolin, Sheldon, 28–29, 48–49
World Bank, 1–2
World Trade Center attack. See
September 11, 2001
wounds: historical dialogue with,
116–17; politics of the wound,
40, 129n5; racism as repetition
of the wound of slavery, 44;
revolution and, 57–58
wrongs, 40, 64, 129n5
Wynter, Sylvia, 25, 36, 103
X, Malcolm, 92–93
zoon politikon, 6